PART I

ORIGINS

ORIGINS

[Story-telling outside books.]

STORY-TELLING has nowadays only a shamefaced existence outside books. We leave the art to the artist, perhaps because he has brought it to such perfection that we do not care to expose our amateur bunglings. If a man has a story to tell after dinner he carefully puts it into slang, or tells it with jerk and gesture in as few words as possible; it is as if he were to hold up a little placard deprecating the idea that he is telling a story at all. The only tales in which we allow ourselves much detail of colouring and background are those in which public opinion has prohibited professional competition. We tell improper stories as competently as ever. But, for the other tales, we set them out concisely, almost curtly, refusing any attempt to imitate the fuller, richer treatment of literature. Our tales are mere plots. We allow ourselves scarcely two sentences of dialogue to clinch them at the finish. We give them no framework. We are shy, except perhaps before a single intimate friend, of trying in a spoken story to reproduce the effect of moonlight in the trees, the flickering firelight on the faces in a tavern, or whatever else of delicacy and embroidery we should be glad to use in writing.

But in the beginning story-telling was not an affair of pen and ink. It began with the Warning Examples naturally told by a mother to her children, and with the Embroidered Exploits told by a boaster to his wife or friends. The early woman would persuade her child from the fire with a tale of how just such another as he had touched the yellow dancer, and had had his hair burned and his eyelashes singed so that he could not look in the face of the sun. Enjoying the narrative, she would give it realistic and credible touches, and so make something more of it than the dull lie of utility. The early man, fresh from an encounter with some beast of the woods, would not be so little of an artist as to tell the actual facts; how he heard a noise, the creaking of boughs and crackling in the undergrowth, and ran. No; he would describe the monster, sketch his panic moments, the short, fierce struggle, his stratagem, and his escape. In these two primitive tales, and their combination in varying proportions, are the germs of all the others. There is no story written to-day which cannot trace its pedigree to those two primitive types of narrative, generated by the vanity of man and the exigencies of his life.

[The professional story-teller.]

At first there would be no professional story-tellers. But it would not be long before, by the camp fire, in the desert tents, and in the huts at night, wherever simple men were together relating the experiences of vigorous days, there would be found some one whose adventures were always the pleasantest to hear, whose deeds were the most marvellous, whose realistic details the most varied. Probably it would also be found that this same man could also give the neatest point to the tales of wisdom that were the children of the Warning Example. Men would begin to quote his stories, and gradually the discrepancy between his life and the life that he lived as he recounted it to his nightly audiences would grow too great to be ignored. His adventures would become too tremendous for himself, and, to save his modesty and preserve his credit, he would father them upon some dead chief, a strong man who had done things that others had not, and, being dead, was unable to contradict with his stone axe his too enthusiastic biographer. Such a man, like many a modern story-teller, would likely use his hold over the imagination of his fellows to become the medicine man of his tribe, the depositary of their traditions, their sage as well as their entertainer. He would create gods besides rebuilding men, and while his people were sheltering in the huts and listening atremble to the dying rolls of the thunder, would describe how his hero, the dead chief of long ago, was even now wrestling with the Thunder God and getting his knee upon that mighty throat. In the beginning man was a very little thing in the face of a stupendous Universe. Story-telling raised him higher and higher until at last heaven and earth were hidden by the gigantic figure of a man. In the Arthur legend, in the legend of Charlemagne, in the Sagas, we can watch men becoming heroes, and heroes supernatural. Then story-telling, having done so much, was to set to work in the opposite direction, and we shall see the figures of men gradually shrinking into their true proportions through each successive phase of the art, until, now that we have examples of all stages permanently before us, we manufacture gods, heroes, men, and creatures less than men, with almost equal profusion.

[In early story-telling heroes are more than life size.]

But in the beginning of written story-telling, when life was a huge battle in which it was the proper thing to die, when the heroes of stories were not finished off with marriage but by the more definite means of a battle-axe, when life was a thing of such swiftness, fierceness, and force, it was clear to his biographer that the creature who conquered it was surely more than man. His were the attributes of the gods, with whom he was not frightened to struggle or to be allied. Sigurd's pedigree is carried back to Odin. Pippin struck a sword through the devil who met him as he went to bath, and found that 'the shape was so far material that it defiled all those waters with blood and gore and horrid slime. Even this did not upset the unconquerable Pippin. He said to his chamberlain: "Do not mind this little affair. Let the defiled water run for a while; and then, when it flows clear again, I will take my bath without delay."' Beowulf fought with dragons and died boasting gloriously. Theirs are the figures of men a thousand times man's height, very man-like, but gigantic, like the watchers shadowed on the mountain mist.

[Silk and homespun stories.]

Each nation showed its peculiar spirit in huge cycles of narrative. The solid force of the Vikings and their sword-bright imagery survives in the Sagas; the French chivalry in the legends of Charlemagne and Arthur; the Celtic feeling for the veiled things in the spells and dreams of the _Mabinogion_. These were the great stories of their peoples. But side by side with them were others. The thralls of the Vikings heard of Brunhild and Gudrun, the serfs of France heard of Roland and Bertha with the Large Feet; but they had also tales of their own. The tales of silk have been preserved for us in writing, but what of the tales of homespun yarn that no old clerk thought worthy of a manuscript with gold leaves, and sweet faces, and blue and scarlet flowers entwined around its borders?

Very few of these homespun stories were written down. _Reynard the Fox_ had few brethren except in spoken story-telling. Perhaps just because they never were written down, we can guess from the folk-lore that has survived among us to our own day, and from the tales we hear from savages, what were those tales of Jean and Jaques, that were perhaps nearer modern story-telling than the great books that were known by their masters. In folk-tale, as in _Reynard the Fox_, we find very different virtues from those of the knights, heroes, kings, and gods. In the silken tales the virtues are those of Don Quixote; in the homespun stories they are those of Sancho Panza. Chivalry would seem an old conceit; bravery, foolhardiness. Sagacity, cunning, and mischief are their motives. In the silken tales there is no scorn shown save of cowards, in the folk-tales none save of fools. Perhaps the proverbs illustrate them best. 'Do not close the stable door after the horse has gone.' 'A stitch in time saves nine.' 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.' These are all short stories summed in a sentence, and any one of them might serve as the motive of a modern novel.

[The swineherd and the king's daughter.]

From the time that stories began to be written down, we can watch them coming nearer and nearer to this level, nearer and nearer the ordinary man. The history of story-telling henceforth is that of the abasement of the grand and the uplifting of the lowly, and of the mingling of the two. The folk-tale of the swineherd who married the king's daughter is the history alike of the progress of humanity and of the materials of story-telling.

[Reduction in the size of the heroes.]

But before the heroes of written story-telling could begin to be humble, they had to leave off being gods. It is possible to observe the transformation by comparing a set of early stories composed at practically the same time, but in different countries, in different stages of civilisation, and so, for the purpose of our argument, in sequence. The _Volsunga Saga_, the _Mabinogion_ and _Aucassin and Nicolete_ were all composed about the same time, but there are centuries of development between them. The heroes of the sagas are 'too largely thewed for life'; Aucassin is a boy. Love in the sagas is a fierce passion, the mainspring of terrific deeds; Aucassin's love is a tender obsession that keeps him from his arms, and lets him ride, careless and dreaming, into the midst of his enemies. In the _Morte Darthur_, as we have it in Malory's version of the much older tales, we can see the two spirits pulling at cross purposes in the same book. Beneath there is the rugged brutality of the old fighting tales, overlaid now with the softer texture of chivalry and gentleness. The one shows through the other like the grey rock through the green turf of our north country fields.

[Technique of the Sagas.]

The technique of the old tales varies most precisely with the humanity and loss of super-humanity of their heroes. In the sagas it is very simple. The effect is got by sheer weight and mass of magnificent human material. The details are those of personal appearance and armour; there are no settings. The men ride out gorgeous and bright in battle array, with gold about their helms, and painted shields, on great white horses against a sombre sky. There is no other background to the tales than heaven and the watchful gods. It was not until a later stage in their development that story-tellers painted their full canvas, and put in woodland and castle and all those other accessories that force their human figures to a human height. At first, like the early painters, they were content with the outlines of men doing things; their audiences, with unspoilt imaginations, filled in the rest themselves. Then, too, they told their tales in a short sing-song form of verse that served well to keep them in mind, but prevented any great variation in emphasis. A lament for the dead warrior, a pæan for his victory, and an account of his wife's beauty, a genealogical tree, were all forced to jog to the same tune, and the atmosphere and scent of their telling could only be altered by the intonations of the singer. They still depended for their effect on the men who recited them, and had not achieved the completeness of expression that would give them independence.

[Of the _Mabinogion_.]

The _Mabinogion_, that took literary form at about the same time, were made by a Celtic nation, far further advanced as artists than the Scandinavians. The men are not so great in their biographers' eyes as to hide all else. Picture after picture is made and left as the tale goes on. For example:--

'And at the mouth of the river he beheld a castle, the fairest that man ever saw, and the gate of the castle was open, and he went into the castle. And in the castle he saw a fair hall, of which the roof seemed to be all gold; the walls of the hall seemed to be entirely of glittering precious gems; the doors all seemed to be of gold. Golden seats he saw in the hall, and silver tables. And on a seat opposite to him he beheld two auburn-haired youths playing at chess. He saw a silver board for the chess, and golden pieces thereon. The garments of the youths were of jet black satin, and chaplets of ruddy gold bound their hair, whereon were sparkling jewels of great price, rubies, and gems, alternately with imperial stones. Buskins of new Cordovan leather on their feet, fastened by slides of red gold.

'And beside a pillar in the hall he saw a hoary-headed man, in a chair of ivory, with the figures of two eagles of ruddy gold thereon. Bracelets of gold were upon his arms, and many rings were on his hands, and a golden torque about his neck; and his hair was bound with a golden diadem. He was of powerful aspect. A chessboard of gold was before him and a rod of gold, and a steel file in his hand. And he was carving out chessmen.'[1]

These two paragraphs are almost perfect in their kind. See only how the details are presented in a perfectly natural order, each one as it would strike a man advancing into the hall, who would see everything before discovering exactly what the old man was about with his chessboard, his gold, and his steel file. The Welsh bards were trained more rigorously than the skalds, and were more delicate in their craftsmanship. And yet it is interesting to see how these two paragraphs are the work of a man writing for people in whose eyes gold and ivory and precious stones have still the glory of the new. The feeling of that little piece of story is the same we know ourselves when we have a little child before us, and are telling it wonderful things to make it open its eyes. The opening of eyes was one of the effects at which the early artists aimed.

[Of _Aucassin and Nicolete_.]

And then when we come to _Aucassin and Nicolete_, also written at the same time, but in a country still less barbaric, we find an even more delicate artistry, and a material far nearer that of later story-telling. Not only have the heroes become men, but the wondrous background has become that of real life. There are no castles in _Aucassin and Nicolete_ whose walls are built 'of precious gems, whose doors are all of gold.' Nicolete 'went through the streets of Beaucaire keeping to the shadow, for the moon shone very bright; and she went on till she came to the tower where her friend was. The tower had cracks in it here and there, and she crouched against one of the piers, and wrapped herself in her mantle, and thrust her head into a chink in the tower, which was old and ancient, and heard Aucassin within weeping, and making very great sorrow, and lamenting for his sweet friend whom he loved so much.' Now that is a real tower, as we see again when presently Nicolete has to go along its wall, and let herself down into the ditch, hurting her feet sorely before climbing out on the other side. And is not that an admirable sense for reality that suggested the keeping to the shadow as she crept through the town? As for the humanity of the tale; we have been smitten to awe and worship by the heroes of the sagas, interested in the heroes of the magic-laden Mabinogion, and now we are made to be sorry for Aucassin. Like the swing of a pendulum, the character of heroes has swung from that of God-like ruffians, through that of men, almost to womanhood. We have had terrible tales, and wondrous tales, and now

'There is none in such ill case, Sad with sorrow, waste with care, Sick with sadness, if he hear, But shall in the hearing be Whole again and glad with glee, So _sweet_ the story.'

Loveliness and delicacy are here for their own sakes. We have already passed the early stages of narrative. We are in the time of sweetly patterned art; in the monastery over in England a monk is writing the air of 'Summer is icumen in,' the first known piece of finished, ordered music; everywhere clerks and holy men, aloof a little from the turmoil of life, are making gardens in the margins of missals, and on the roads throughout the world the vagabond students, as separate from the turmoil as the monks, are singing the Latin songs that promised the Renaissance.

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE'

[The thirteenth century.]

THINKING of the Renaissance now, we are apt to see only the flowers of its spring, the work of men like Boccaccio and Chaucer, who were strong enough and aloof enough to lift their heads above the flood of classical learning that refreshed them, and to write as blithely as if there had been never a book in the world before them. It is easy to forget those dull years after Chaucer that showed how exceptional he had been in being at once a student and an artist. It is still easier to forget the winter years of ploughing and sowing and premature birth that were before him, the years when no one thought that poetry could be more esteemed than knowledge, those greedy years of rough and ready erudition between the making of the students' songs and the building of the _Decameron_. Many versions of old legends come to us from that time like the _Life of Robert the Devil_, whose son fought with Charlemagne. Many of the legends of the kind that the son of Mr. Bickerstaff's friend was such a proficient in, and many collections of miracles and small romances of chivalry less beautiful than that of Aucassin, were at least written down in these years. The monasteries held most of the learned men, and became more important than the minstrels in the history of story-telling. They produced the books of miracles, and also several armouries of warning examples, many of them taken from the classics, for the vanquishing of scrupulous sinners and the edification of all. Books like the _Gesta Romanorum_, volumes of tales more or less irrelevantly tagged with morals, were the forerunners of collections of less instructive stories, like those of Boccaccio's country-house party, or those of Chaucer's pilgrims riding to Canterbury. These books, with their frequent reference to antiquity, showed signs of the new spirit that was spreading over Europe; the miracle-tales and the exaggerated wondering biographies held the essence of the old. Rome in the former was the city built by Romulus and Remus; Rome in the latter was the place that had been rescued by Charlemagne, the place that was ruled by the Pope.

But in that thirteenth century, when so many new things were struggling to birth, one book stands out above all others as the most perfect illustration of its spirit. The very fact that it is so much less of a story than the anecdotes of the _Gesta Romanorum_ had almost made me pass it over in a more detailed criticism of them, but this same fact perfects it as an example of an artist's attitude in the time of the revival of classical learning. It was almost an accident that let me see these years of novel study and eager wisdom so clearly expressed in the long rhyming narrative of the _Romance of the Rose_, that was known above all other books for a hundred years, that was read by Ronsard, modernised by Marot, and partly translated by Chaucer. The accident was such that I think there is no irrelevance in describing it.

[Meung-sur-Loire.]

Walking through France with the manuscript of my history on my back, I came at evening of an April day into the little grey French town of Meung, set on the side of a hill above the Loire. Small cobbled streets twisted this way and that, up and down, between the old houses, and walking under the gateway, the Porte d'Amont, with its low arch and narrow windows overhead, I felt I was stepping suddenly from the broad, practical France, whose roadside crucifixes are made of iron a hundred at a time, into a forgotten corner of that older France whose spirit clings about the new, like the breath of lavender in a room where it has once been kept. In the inn where I left my knapsack there was a miller who drank a bottle of wine with me, and talked of old Jean Clopinel, who was born here in Meung those centuries ago. 'And it was a big book he had the writing of too, and a wise book, so they tell me, and good poetry; but it's written in the old French that's not our language any longer; I could not read it if I tried, and why should I? They know all about it in the town.'

Indeed the town seemed a piece of the old French itself, with its partly ruined church, and the little château crowned with conical cap-like towers, the broad Loire flowing below. I thought of _The Romance of the Rose_, Jean Clopinel's book, the book that meant so much to the Middle Ages, the book that, unwieldy as it is, is still deliciously alive. I thought of Jean Clopinel and his description of himself, put as a prophecy into the mouth of the God of Love:--

'Then shall appear Jean Clopinel, Joyous of heart, of body well And fairly built: at Meun shall he Be born where Loire flows peacefully.'[2]

I made up my mind to look at the old book again when I should have left the road, and be within reach of a larger library than my own manuscript and a single volume of Defoe.

[Jean de Meung.]

Jean de Meung, joyous of heart, belongs absolutely to the mediæval revival of learning. He was less of a poet than a scholar, more pleased with a display of knowledge than of beauty, and yet so far undamped by his learning as to be always ready to put plainly out such observations upon life as keep a reader smiling to-day at their shrewdness and applicability. His share of _The Romance of the Rose_ is a strange and suggestive contrast with the beginning that was written by Guillaume de Lorris. The first part, earlier by forty years than the second, and about a fifth of the length, is a delicious allegory on love, with the sweetness and purity of _Aucassin and Nicolete_; the second opens solidly with a good round speech by Reason, filling something like two thousand lines, and ransacking antiquity to fit her wise saws with ancient instances according to the new fashion of the time.

Taine finds this garrulous Jean 'the most tedious of doctors'; but it is difficult not to throw yourself into his own delight in his new-won knowledge, hard not to enjoy his continual little revelations of character, as when you read:--

'Let one demand of some wise clerk Well versed in that most noble work "Of Consolation" foretime writ By great Boethius, for in it Are stored and hidden most profound And learned lessons: 'twould redound Greatly to that man's praise who should Translate that book with masterhood,'

and know that he made the translation himself.

[The world at school.]

The very popularity of the book proves that the whole world was at school then, and eager to be taught. Lorris, poet though he is, reminds his readers that his embroidered tale hides something really valuable, that it is 'fair wit with wisdom closely wed,' knowing well that he could find no better bait to keep them with him to the end. And Jean, when it comes to his turn, admirably expresses the contemporary point of view. He has no doubts at all between the comparative worths of manner and matter. He justifies the classics by saying:--

'For oft their quip and crank and fable Is wondrous good and profitable.'

[One of the schoolmasters.]

The permanent value of knowledge is always before him, and having learnt a great deal himself, what wonder that he should empty it all out, only now and again giving the tale a perfunctory prod forward before continuing his discourse? Knowledge comes always before culture, and knowledge taken with such abandon is almost inspiriting. I cannot be bored by a scholar who in the thirteenth century is so independent and so frank. Eager quarry work such as his had to precede the refined statuary of the Renaissance, and in _The Romance of the Rose_ the pedagogue is far too human to be dismissed as a dealer in books alone. Wisdom and observation were not disunited in him, and there are in that rambling, various repository of learning promises enough of realistic story-telling and of the criticism of life, sufficiently valuable to excuse its atrocious narrative, even were that not justified by the classical allusion with which it is so abundantly loaded. It gives me pleasure to hear Jean Clopinel defend plain speaking, and, protesting against calling spades anything but spades, prepare the way for Rabelais. What matter if the romance suffer a little, and the Rose lie pressed beneath a weight of scholarship? Jean himself moves on unhampered. He talked of women's table-manners so well that Chaucer himself could do no better than borrow from him. He attacked womenkind in general so mercilessly (with the authority of the classics behind him) that he won a stern rebuke from Christine de Pisan, that popular authoress of a century later, just as Schopenhauer might be censured by Miss Corelli. He looks at kings, and, turning away, remarks that it is best, if a man wishes to feel respectful towards them, that he should not see them too close. Nor does he forget to let us know his views on astronomy, on immortality, or his preference of nature over art in sculpture and painting. This last opinion of his is an illustration of that good and honest Philistinism that he needed for his work. All these things and a thousand others he puts, without a shudder, into the continuation of a story on the art of loving, that begins with a spring morning account of a dreamer's vision of a rose and a garden, and Mirth and Idleness, Youth and Courtesy, dancing together as if in a picture by Botticelli.

[In Meung six hundred years ago.]

I went down that night just after sunset and crossed the river in the dusk. Resting in the middle of the bridge and looking over the dim reflections to the far-distant bank, with its grove of huge trees, and the tower of the church with the outline of the gateway on the hill behind just showing against the sky, I dreamed that I was back in the old days, when the minstrel was giving place to the scholar, and that up there on the hill, in the little town of Meung, was Jean, Doctor of Divinity, poring at his books. I remembered the bust by Desvergnes, that beautiful scholar's face, and thought how strong a personality his must have been, to leave after six hundred years and more the memory of himself and the feeling of his time so vividly impressed upon the town. For even now, though they do not read his book in Meung, they know all about it, and talk of him with that reverence in speaking that children use when they talk of a master whom they do not often see. I could not help feeling that their attitude was traditional. It has been the same for all these years, and perhaps long ago the townsfolk, passing in the narrow streets, hushed themselves before one door, and whispered, 'Yes; he is in there writing a book; there are not many who can do that,' while old Jean Clopinel inside nursed his lame leg and dipped from folio to folio, as he took gem and pebble from the dead tongue and put his vivid thought and gleeful knowledge in black letter on the parchment, in black-lettered French, the speech of his own people, that all might see how fine a thing it was to look into antiquity and to be wise.

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

CHAUCER AND BOCCACCIO

[The Romancers before Chaucer.]

THE Franklin of Chaucer's pilgrims introduces his own story by remarking that,

'Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes Of diverse aventures maden layes, Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge; Which layes with hir instruments they songe, Or elles redden hem for hir pleasaunce; And oon of hem have I in remembraunce Which I shal seyn with good wil as I can.'

Chaucer had many of them 'in remembraunce,' and though he shared the knowledge of Jean de Meung, and was not, like the Franklin, a man who

'sleep never on the mount of Parnaso, Ne lerned Marcus Tullius Cithero,'

these tales, whether made by the 'olde gentil Britons' or the French, must not be forgotten in considering him.

The romancers who preceded him, and, clad in bright colours, chanted their stories before the ladies and knights in the rush-carpeted halls, turning somersaults between their chapters, as many a modern novelist might for the enlivenment of his narrative, were not scholars, but had great store of legendary matter from which they made their tales. Their material continued to be used, more and more elaborately, until the time of Cervantes, and in such books as the _Morte Darthur_ we can see what manner of material it was. They were not in the least afraid of the supernatural, and they knew the undying attraction of hard blows. Their tales were compiled without reference to the classics, and contain all the characteristics of primitive story-telling noted in the chapter on Origins. They represented, fairly accurately, the Embroidered Exploit. They were tales of heroes, knights, and kings, half elfin stuff, half history, elaborate genealogical narratives in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and the grandsons' misfortunes are connected with their parents' revenge on the previous generation. There were great dragon-slayers before the Lord, and many who, like Charlemagne, were mighty killers of Saracens in the cause of Christendom. And then there were such tales as that of Melusine, whose father, King Helymas, married a fairy, and out of love for her broke his promise not to inquire how she was when she lay in childbed. Melusine suffers accordingly, spending every Saturday bathing herself, with her delicate white limbs hidden beneath a serpent's scaly skin. There comes to her a young knight called Raymondin whom she saves by her wisdom, enriches by her magic, weds with great pomp, and presents in successive years with ten sons, each curiously deformed by reason of the fairy blood. Raymondin, in espousing her, promises to make no inquiries about her doings on Saturdays. He breaks his promise, like his father-in-law before him, and when, in anger at the ill-deeds of one of his sons, he reproaches her with what she is, she sadly takes leave of him, and flies off through the window, 'transfigured lyke a serpent grete and long in fifteen foote of lengthe.' There were tales too of more charming fancy, like that of the queen who bore seven children at a birth, six boys and a girl, with silver chains about their necks. The midwife, in her devilish way, showed her seven puppies with silver collars instead of her litter of babes, privately sending the children to be killed. The children, however, left in the forest, were nurtured by a nanny-goat and cared for by a hermit, until the midwife discovered that they were not dead, when she sent men to see that they were properly scotched. But the men were so softened by the accident of meeting a crowd busied with the burning of a woman who had killed her child, that they had only heart to take the chains from off the babies' necks, whereupon they flew away as white swans. That is the beginning of the tale.

[The _Gesta Romanorum._]

There were tales like these representing the Embroidered Exploit, and there were others illustrating in a curious manner the growth of the Warning Example. These latter were the forerunners of the tales of Boccaccio, who, like Chaucer, stands as it were with a Janus-head, looking both ways, modern and primitive at once. The _Gesta Romanorum_ is a perfectly delightful book, whose purpose was, however, not pleasure but edification. It is a collection of stories containing amusement and religion, diversion and instruction--a primrose path from the everlasting bonfire. The anecdotes are from a thousand sources. Many of them are taken from the classics, but the references are so inaccurate as to make it pretty certain that the monkish writer had not read them, but had gleaned them from the conversation of other monks he knew. And some of them cannot have come to him within the monastery. I can imagine the old man, with his hood well thrown back, lolling on a bench, behind a tankard of good wine and a dish of fruit, laughing gleefully at the tale of the rich patroness or pious knight who wished to entertain themselves and him. For almost the only things monkish about the stories are the applications or morals, some of which are so far fetched as to make it clear that the monk compiler has included a tale for the pleasure he has himself won from it, and, after writing it down, been hard put to it to find a moral that should justify its place in a book intended as an armoury for preachers. Here is an example:--

'OF THE AVARICIOUS PURSUIT OF RICHES, WHICH LEADS TO HELL.'

'A certain carpenter, residing in a city near the sea, very covetous and very wicked, collected a large sum of money, and placed it in the trunk of a tree, which he stationed by his fireside, and which he never lost sight of. A place like this, he thought, no one could suspect; but it happened, that while all his household slept, the sea overflowed its boundaries, broke down that side of the building where the log was situated, and carried it away. It floated many miles from its original destination, and reached at length a city in which there lived a person who kept open house. Arising early in the morning, he perceived the trunk of a tree in the water, and thinking it would be of service to him, he brought it to his own home. He was a liberal, kind-hearted man, and a great benefactor to the poor. It one day chanced that he entertained some pilgrims in his house; and the weather being extremely cold, he cut up the log for firewood. When he had struck two or three blows with the axe, he heard a rattling sound; and cleaving it in twain, the gold pieces rolled out in every direction. Greatly rejoiced at the discovery, he reposited them in a secure place, until he should ascertain who was the owner.

'Now the carpenter, bitterly lamenting the loss of his money, travelled from place to place in pursuit of it. He came, by accident, to the house of the hospitable man who had found the trunk. He failed not to mention the object of his search; and the host, understanding that the money was his, reflected whether his title to it were good. "I will prove," said he to himself, "if God will that the money should be returned to him." Accordingly he made three cakes, the first of which he filled with earth, the second with the bones of dead men, and in the third he put a quantity of the gold which he had discovered in the trunk. "Friend," said he, addressing the carpenter, "we will eat three cakes, composed of the best meat in my house. Chuse which you will have." The carpenter did as he was directed, he took the cakes and weighed them in his hand, one after another, and finding that the earth weighed heaviest, he chose it. "And if I want more, my worthy host," added he, "I will have that"--laying his hand upon the cake containing the bones. "You may keep the third cake yourself." "I see clearly," murmured the host, "I see very clearly that God does not will the money to be returned to this wretched man." Calling, therefore, the poor and infirm, the blind and the lame, and opening the cake of gold in the presence of the carpenter, to whom he spoke, "Thou miserable varlet, this is thine own gold. But thou preferredst the cake of earth and dead men's bones. I am persuaded, therefore, that God wills not that I return thee thy money." Without delay, he distributed the whole among the paupers, and drove the carpenter away in great tribulation.'

So much for the story, which is indeed rather long to be quoted in so small a book. But listen now to the application:--

'My beloved, the carpenter is any worldly-minded man; the trunk of the tree denotes the human heart, filled with the riches of this life. The host is a wise confessor. The cake of earth is the world; that of the bones of dead men is the flesh; and that of gold is the kingdom of heaven.'

[Chaucer and Boccaccio.]

The modern novel could have no beginning in a literature so far removed from ordinary life as the romances, so brief in narration, so pious in ideal as the Gesta. Something more of flesh and blood, something of coarser grain than dreams, on the one hand, and on the other something fuller fleshed than the skeletonic anecdote (however marrowy its bones) was needed to produce it. It needed men and women, and it needed a more delicate narrative form, portraiture, and the fine art of story-telling, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. Chaucer, for all that he wrote in verse, was not a _trouveur_ when he was at his best. Boccaccio was not a collector of anecdotes. The new classical learning had given them humaner outlooks. The attitude of the _Canterbury Tales_ is not that of the _Song of Roland_, or the _Morte Darthur_; the attitude of the _Decameron_ is not that of the Gesta. Chaucer and Boccaccio, sometimes at least, were plain men, pleasantly conscious of their humanity, telling stories to amuse their friends.

Chaucer was a middle-class Englishman, Boccaccio a middle-class Italian. They both wrote in languages that were scarcely older than themselves, in languages that were rather popular than learned. They were both in a sense mediators between the classical culture and their own people. There the resemblance ends, and their personal characters begin to seal the impressions they made on their respective literatures. They represent two quite distinct advances in the art of story-telling, the one in material, the other in technique. In both of them there is a personal honesty of workmanship that makes their work their own. The names of the _trouveurs_ are lost, or, at least, not connected with what they did. They were workers on a general theme, and counted no more in the production of the whole than the thousand men who chiselled out each his piece of carving round the arches of Notre Dame. They were the tools of their nations. Chaucer and Boccaccio were men whose workmanship had its special marks, its private personality. They were artists in their own right and not artisans.

[Chaucer.]

Chaucer's was a fairly simple nature. He seems to have taken to Renaissance fashions just as he took to Renaissance learning, without in the least disturbing the solid Englishness of his foundation. He married a Damsell Philippa without letting his marriage interfere with an ideal and unrequited passion like that of Petrarch for Laura. He had Jean de Meung's own reverence for the classics. 'Go litel book, go litel my tragedie,' he says in '_Troilus and Criseyd_,

'And kiss the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace Virgil, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.'

And yet few men have about them less of a classical savour. He may well have liked 'at his beddes heed

'Twenty bokes clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophye,'

but he was a man of the true 'Merry England,' when oxen were roasted whole on feast-days, and pigs ran in the London streets. He followed the Court, but he knew the populace. His father was a vintner in Thames Street, and in the Cheapside taverns Chaucer found some of the material that his travels and learning taught him how to use. On St. George's day 1374 he was granted a pitcher of wine daily for life by his Majesty Edward the Third. It is probable that he met Petrarch at Padua. These two facts seem to me to present no very hollow portrait of the man.

[Portraiture.]

He brought into the art of story-telling a new clearness of sight in looking at other people and at the manners of the time. The romances had not represented contemporary life, but rather contemporary ideals. No one can pretend to find in Lancelot, in Roland, in Isoud of the White Hands, character-sketch or portrait. Lancelot is the perfect knight, Roland the perfect warrior, Isoud the beautiful woman. They were not a knight, a warrior, a woman. Those who heard the tales used the names as servant-girls use names in modern novels of plot, as pegs on which to hang their own emotions and their own ambitions. The lady who listened with her chin upon her hands as the _trouveurs_ chanted before her, took herself the part of Isoud, and gave her lover or the lover for whom she hoped the attributes of Tristram. The jack-squire listening near the foot of the table himself felt Roland's steed between his legs. These names of romance were qualities not people. The Wife of Bath is a very different matter.

'In al the parisshe wyf ne was ther noon That to th' offering bifore hir sholde goon; And if ther dide, certeyn, so wrooth was she, That she was out of alle charitee. Hir coverchiefs ful fyne were of ground; I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound That on a Sonday were upon hir heed. Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed, Ful streite y-teyd, and shoos ful moiste and newe. Bold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe. She was a worthy womman al hir lyve, Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve, Withouten other companye in youthe; But therof nedeth nat to speke as nouthe. And thryes hadde she been at Jerusalem; She hadde passed many a straunge streem; At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne, In Galice at seint Jame, and at Coloigne. She coude much of wandring by the weye; Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye. Upon an amblere esily she sat, Y-wimpled wel, and on hir heed an hat As brood as is a bokeler or a targe; A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large, And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe. In felawschip wel coude she laughe and carpe. Of remedyes of love she knew perchaunce, For she coude of that art the olde daunce.'

She is there, solid, garrulous, herself. She does not get husbands because she is a worshipped goddess, but because she is a practical woman. Bold indeed would be the lady who in imagination played her part. The Wife is no empty fancy dress in which we move and live; she is well filled out with her own flesh, and we watch her from outside as we would watch a neighbour. Hers is no veil of dreams, but a good and costly one, bought at Bristol Fair by one or other of her five husbands whom she has badgered into getting it.

Story-tellers before Chaucer seemed scarcely to have realised that men were more than good or bad, brave or coward. You hated a man, or you loved him, laughed at, or admired him; it never occurred to you to observe him. Every man was man, every woman woman. It was not until the Renaissance that modern story-telling found one of its motives, which is, that there are as many kinds of man and woman as there are men and women in the world. Then, at last, character and individuality became suddenly important. Passion, reverence, charm had existed before in story-telling. To these was now added another possibility of the art in portrait painting. So was the modern world differentiated from the dark ages; blinking in the unaccustomed light, men began to look at one another. In painting, almost simultaneously with literature, the new power found expression. The Van Eycks were alive before Chaucer was dead, and in the careful, serene painting of 'John Arnolfini and his Wife,' is the observant spirit of the _Canterbury Tales_. That woman standing there in her miraculously real green robe, her linen neat upon her head, her hand laid in her husband's, and her eyes regarding his pious, solemn gesture as if she had consented in her own mind to see him painted as he wished, and not betray her sense of humour, the man, the pattens on the floor, the little dog, and the detailed chandelier, are all painted as if in Chaucer's verse. The identity of them is the amazing thing; their difference from all the other men and women of the town, the difference of their room from all other rooms, and their little dog from all other little dogs. To compare that married couple with any knight and lady carved in stone, hands folded over breasts, on a tomb in an old church, is to compare the modern with the mediæval, and the Wife of Bath with Guenevere or the Wife of Sir Segwarides.

[Prose and verse.]

After Chaucer, narrative scarcely developed except in prose. Scott, indeed, nearly five centuries later, wrote his first tales in verse, but the rhyming story-teller disappeared in the greater author of the Waverley Novels.[3] Chaucer himself is interesting for marking the transition. He had many attributes of later narrative, in his round English humour, in his concern with actual life, although in this essay I have only needed him to illustrate the beginnings of the portrait-making that has since become so important a byway of the art. But while his verse in the _Canterbury Tales_ has the effect of good prose, his prose, excellent elsewhere, is here unwieldy and beyond his governance. He expressed the new attitude in the old way; but when he was only nine years old, there had been written in Italy prose tales that have hardly been excelled as examples of the two forms of the short story. Chaucer was born in 1340. In 1349 Boccaccio finished the _Decameron_.

[Boccaccio.]

Boccaccio had a more intricate mind than Chaucer's, and a more elaborate life. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant and a Frenchwoman, and the two nations certainly seem to have contributed to his character. He spent six years of his youth apprenticed to a merchant in Paris, forsook business, and was sent to learn law, and only in the end persuaded his father to let him devote himself to books. He had a knowledge of the world uncommon even in his day, and a knowledge of letters that was rare. He was something of a scholar, something of a courtier, and, particularly, something of a poet. Sentence after sentence in the _Decameron_ glides by like a splash of sunlight on a stream with floating blossoms. I must quote one of his poems in Rossetti's most beautiful translation:--

'By a clear well, within a little field Full of green grass and flowers of every hue, Sat three young girls, relating (as I knew) Their loves. And each had twined a bough to shield Her lovely face; and the green leaves did yield The golden hair their shadow; while the two Sweet colours mingled, both blown lightly through With a soft wind for ever stirred and still'd. After a little while one of them said (I heard her), 'Think! If, ere the next hour struck, Each of our lovers should come here to-day, Think you that we should fly or feel afraid?' To whom the others answered, 'From such luck A girl would be a fool to run away.'

He could write a poem like that; he could write the _Decameron_; he could write books of greater impropriety; and at the end of his life could beg his friends to leave such books alone, devoting himself to the compilation of ponderous works of classical learning. There is a legend of a deathbed vision of Judgment where Boccaccio figured, which, being reported to him, nearly gave the wit, the scholar, and the gallant the additional mask of the Carthusian religious.

But the Boccaccio of the _Decameron_ was the mature young man, of personal beauty, and nimble tongue, a Dioneo, who had his own way with the company in which he found himself, and was licensed, like a professional jester, to say the most scandalous things. He knew the rich colour, classical learning, and jollity of morals of the Court of Naples. Here he heard the travelling story-tellers, and perhaps learnt from them a little of the art of narrative. He knew the _Gesta Romanorum_, and began to collect tales himself with the idea of making some similar collection. Noting story after story that he heard told (for it would be ridiculous to reason from the widespread origin of his tales that he had a stupendous knowledge of the world's books), he wrote them with a perfect feeling for value and proportion. In him the story-teller ceased to be an improviser. In his tales the longwindedness of the _trouveurs_ was gone, gone also the nakedness of the anecdote. He refused to excuse them with the moral tags of the Gesta. These new forms were not things of utility that needed justification; they were things of independent beauty.

[His story-telling.]

Boccaccio was intent simply on the art of telling tales. He knew enough of classical literature to feel the possible dignity and permanence of prose, and he told his stories as they were told to him in a supple, pleasant vernacular that obeyed him absolutely and never led him off by its own strangeness into byways foreign to the tales and to himself. He found his material in anecdotes of current gossip, like Cecco Angiolieri's misadventure with his money, his palfrey, and his clothes, and in popular tales like that of the overpatient Griselda. He took it in the rough and shaped it marvellously, creating two forms, the short story proper, the skilful development of a single episode, and the little novel, the French _nouvelle_, a tale whose incidents are many and whose plot may be elaborate. From his day to our own these two forms have scarcely altered, and in the use of both of them he showed that invaluable art, so strenuously attained by later story-tellers, of compelling us to read with him to the end, even if we know it, for the mere joy of narrative, the delight of his narrating presence. We are so well content with Chaucer's gorgeous improvisations that we never ask whether this piece or that is relevant to the general theme. But in Boccaccio there are no irrelevancies, praise that can be given to few story-tellers before the time of the self-conscious construction of men like Poe, and the austere selection of men like Mérimée and Flaubert.

[Importance of framework in books of short tales.]

Even without their setting his tales would have been something memorable, something that lifted the art to a new level and made less loving workmanship an obvious backsliding. But stories put together do not make good books. The _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ are very short and make a collection of anecdotes. The _Exemplary Novels_ of Cervantes are very long and stand and fall each one alone. But the _Canterbury Tales_ are the better for that merry company on pilgrimage. And when Queen Joan of Naples, profligate, murderess, and bluestocking, asked Boccaccio to put his stories in a book, it was well that he should have the plague of 1348 to set as purple velvet underneath his gems--the morality inseparable from the tales was so simple and so careless. Boccaccio's attitude was that of his age. Man has wants: if he can satisfy them, good: if not, why then it may ease his sorrow to hear it professionally expressed:--'Help me,' as Chaucer says:--

'Help me that am the sorwful instrument That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne!'

As for good fortune, it is taken as naïvely as by the topers in the song:--

'Maults gone down, maults gone down From an old angel to a French crown. And every drunkard in this town Is very glad that maults gone down.'

When Troilus is happy with Cressida, Chaucer smiles aside:--'With worse hap God let us never mete.' And Boccaccio, after describing a scene that in England at the present day would be the prelude to a case at law, and columns of loathsomely prurient newspaper reports, ejaculates with simple piety:--'God grant us the like.' The _Decameron_ owes much of its dignity and permanence to its double frame, to the Court of Story-telling in the garden on the hill, and to the deeper irony that places it, sweet, peaceful, and insouciant, in the black year of pestilence and death.

THE ROGUE NOVEL

THE ROGUE NOVEL

[Democracy in literature.]

FEW characters in literature have had so large or so honourable a progeny as the gutter-snipe. If the Kings' daughters of High Romance, charming, delicate creatures, had only wedded with Kings' sons, as delicately fashioned as themselves, we should never have known the sterling dynasty of the Tom Joneses and the Humphry Clinkers, with their honest hearts and coarse hides warranted to wear. All those Kings of men, whose thrones were beer-barrels, whose sceptres, oaken cudgels, whose perennial counsellor was Jollity, whose enemy, Introspection, would never have come to their own, and indeed would never have been born, if it had not been for the sixteenth century entry of the rascal into the Palace gardens, for the escapades of such shaggy-headed, smutfaced, barefooted urchins as Lazarillo de Tormes.

To such rogues as he must be attributed much of our present humanity; for until we could laugh at those of low estate, we held them of little account. There is small mention made of serving-men in the _Morte Darthur_ or the _Mabinogion_, and when, in the _Heptameron_ of Margaret of Navarre, we hear of the drowning of a number of them in trying to render easy the passage of their masters through the floods, the comment is extremely short: 'One must not despair for the loss of servants, for they are easy to replace.' On a similar occasion 'all the company were filled with a joy inestimable, praising the Creator, who, contenting himself with serving-men, had saved the masters and mistresses,' an index alike to the ferocity they still attributed to God and the rather exclusive humanity of themselves. Do you not think with sudden awe of the revolution to come? Do you not hear a long way off the trampling of a million serving-men, prepared to satisfy God with other lives? It is a fine contrast to turn from these queenly sentences to this little book, the autobiography of a beggar, who thinks himself sufficiently important to set down the whole truth about his birth, lest people should make any mistake. 'My father, God be kind to him, had for fifteen years a mill on the river of Tormes.... I was scarcely eight when he was accused of having, with evil intent, made leakage in his check sacks.... Letting himself be surprised, he confessed all, and suffered patiently the chastisement of justice, which makes me hope that he is, according to the Gospel, of the number of those happy in the Glory of God.' No very reputable parentage this, in a day when it was the fashion to derive heroes from Charlemagne or Amadis.

[_Lazarillo de Tormes._]

It is a short step from the ironic to the sincere. The author of the book is laughing at his hero, and makes a huge joke of his pretensions. But to recognise, even in jest, that a vagabond rogue could have pretensions, or indeed any personal character at all beyond that of a tool in the hand of whoever was kind enough to use him, was to look upon him with a humaner eye and, presently, to recognise him in earnest as a fellow creature. It seems to me significant that the first rogues in our literature should come from Spain, a country that has never quite forgotten its Moorish occupation. In the Spanish student, who, so tradition says, wrote _Lazarillo_ while in the University of Salamanca, there must have been something of the spirit of the race that lets the hunchback tell his story to the Caliph, and is glad when the son of the barber marries the daughter of the Grand Vizier. For, joke as it is, the book is the story of a beggar, told as a peculiarly fearless and brazen beggar would tell it, without suggesting or demanding either condescension or pity.

[The morality of the underworld.]

There is genius in the little book. Its author perhaps did better than he meant, for he brings on every page the moral atmosphere of the underworld, the old folk-morality, the same in sixteenth-century Spain as in the oldest tales of sagacity and cunning. Lazarillo's shameless mother apprentices him to a blind beggar who promises to treat him like a son and begins his education at once. He takes the boy to a big stone on the outskirts of the town, and bids him listen to the noise within it. The boy puts his head close to the stone to hear the better, and the old rascal gives him a thundering blow, which, the stone being an admirable anvil, nearly cracks his skull. That is his first lesson ... never to be unsuspicious ... and it is as characteristic of the others as of _Reynard the Fox_.

There never was so excellent a beggar as Lazarillo's master; no trick of the trade was unknown to him. As a fortune-teller, he could prophesy what his victims wished to hear. As a doctor he had his remedies for toothache, and for fainting-fits; not an illness could be mentioned but he had a physic ready to his hands. Then too, 'he knew by heart more prayers than all the blind men of Spain. He recited them very distinctly, in a low tone, grave and clear, calling the attention of the whole church; he accompanied them with a posture humble and devout, without gesticulations or grimaces of mouth, after the manner of those blind men who have not been properly brought up.' Indeed his only fault was avarice. 'He was not content with making me die of hunger,' says his pupil; 'he was doing the same himself.'

Under such a master Lazarillo's wits sharpen quickly. 'A fool would have been dead a hundred times; but by my subtlety and my good tricks, I always, or mostly (in spite of all his care), succeeded in getting hold of the biggest and best portion.' Lazarillo becomes as astute a rascal as his teacher, and, living fairly and squarely in the conditions of the underworld, his villainy does not damp his spirits, or disturb his peace of nights. I was reminded of him by a young tramp with whom I walked in the north country, a rogue with as merry a heart as he, and a similar well-fitting morality. With me, from whom he knew there was nothing to gain but good fellowship, he was a good fellow, walked with a merry stride, whistled as he went, sang me songs in the Gaelic of his childhood, and told me of the jolly tricks he had played with a monkey he had brought from over sea. We walked like men in the sunshine. But when, beyond a turn in the road, he saw some person coming a little better dressed, why then his face flashed into a winking melancholy, his stride degenerated as if by magic into a slouch, and it was odd if his mean figure and despairing hand did not attract a copper, for which he would call down a blessing. Then, as soon as we were out of sight of his benefactor, he would resume his natural walk and burst again into whistling and merriment. Lazarillo is as frank as he. He recognises his needs (Hunger is not an easy fellow to ignore), and would be much surprised if you denied his right to satisfy them. Nor is he disappointed in you. Every honest man must love a rogue, and you are as consciencelessly glad as himself when Lazarillo, by kneeling before him and sucking the liquor through a straw, diddles the blind man who greedily guards the wine bowl between his ragged knees. You feel that he has but his due when he happens upon a wife and a living and (if you read the continuation of his history[4]) find nothing blameworthy in the fact that he spends his last years in the clothes and reputation of a dead hermit, subsisting on the charity of the religious.

[The form of the rogue novel.]

I have talked at some length about the contents of this little book in order to illustrate the new material then brought into story-telling. Let me now consider the new form that came with it. _Lazarillo de Tormes_ was a very simple development from the plain anecdote or merry quip of folklore or gossip, which was, as we have seen in the last chapter, one of the popular early forms of narrative. Boccaccio raised the anecdote to a higher level of art by giving it a fuller technique and expanding it into the short story. The inventors of the rogue novels achieved a similar result by stringing a number of anecdotes together about a particular hero, making as it were cycles of anecdotes comparable in their humbler way with the grand cycles of romance. Lazarillo himself is not an elaborate conception, but simply a fit rogue to play the main part in a score or so of roguish exploits, idly following one another as they occurred to the mind of the narrator. His life is a jest-book turned into a biography, a collection of anecdotes metamorphosed into a novel.

[Its satirical material.]

The new form gave story-telling a wider scope. In writing a collection of anecdotes it was difficult to realise the hero who was no more than a name that happened to be common to them all. It was impossible to make much of the minor characters who walk on or off the tiny stage of each adventure. But in stringing them along a biography, in producing instead of a number of embroidered exploits a single embroidered life, there need be no limit to the choice and elaboration of the embroidery. Though the hero was no more than a quality, a puppet guaranteed to jump on the pull of a string, the setting of his life turned easily into a satirical picture of contemporary existence, and satire became eventually one of the principal aims with which such novels were written.

The low estate of the rogue novel's hero made satire from his lips not only easy but palatable. In writing the opinions of a rogue you can politely assume that his standpoint is not that of his readers. For that reason they can applaud the rascal's wit playing over other people, or, if it touches them too closely, regard it with compassion as lions might listen to the criticism of jackals. _Lazarillo_ contains plenty of good-humoured, bantering portraits: the seller of forged indulgences, the miserly priest, and particularly the out-at-elbows gentleman who walks abroad each day to lunch with a rich friend, and is unable on his return from his hungry promenade to keep from eyeing, and at last from sharing, the rough bread that his servant has begged or stolen for himself. Lazarillo's merit is that he writes of himself _à propos_ of other people, and never barrenly of himself for his own sake. Smollett in writing _Roderick Random_ is true to his traditions in getting his own back from schoolmasters and the Navy Office. And the arms of Dickens, who reformed the workhouses in telling the story of Oliver Twist, must have had quartered upon them the rampant begging bowl of the little Spanish rogue.

Now the characteristic language of satire is as pointed as the blade of a rapier, and for this we owe some gratitude to these rascally autobiographies whose plainness of style was nearer talk than that of any earlier form of narrative. The prose of the picaresque novel has been in every age remarkably free from the literary tricks most fashionable at the time. When your hero dresses in rags you cannot do better than clothe his opinions in simplicity. The writing of _Lazarillo_, of _Tom Jones_, of _Captain Singleton_, of _Lavengro_, is clear, virile, not at all ornate, the exact opposite to that of the Pastorals. Such heroes deliver their sentences, like Long Melford, straight from the shoulder, and would consider fine writing as so much aimless trifling in the air.

[Picaresque autobiographies.]

Mention of _Lavengro_ suggests a paragraph on one of the most curious developments to be noticed in the history of the art. All that we have examined so far have been from truth to fiction; this is a movement from fiction to truth. Stories of the deeds of a man have become romances of the deeds of a hero. A biography has changed as we watched it into a tale of miracle. Here is a quite different phenomenon. An imaginary autobiography that pretends to be real, of a rascally hero, makes it possible for rogues to write real autobiographies that pretend to be imaginary. _Lavengro_ and the _Romany Rye_ are two parts of a rogue novel constructed like the oldest of the kind. They contain a hero somehow put on a different plane from that of respectable society, and the books are made up of the people he meets and the things they say and do to him, or make him do and say. 'Why,' says Borrow, whose attitude towards life is as confident as Lazarillo's, 'there is not a chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated.'

[The development of the rogue novel.]

But Borrow and other makers of confessions are not of the direct line, in spite of the roguish and adventurous air that clings about them as they rest upon our shelves. _Lazarillo_ had many sincerer and more immediate flatterers--Thomas Nash, for example, whose _Jacke Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller_, holds in itself, as one of the earliest pieces of realism in English literature, more than enough of interest for an essay. He had also many younger brothers at home, and an enormous progeny, and it has so happened that the influence of the rogue novel on our own fiction was exerted through them, and not through his early imitations in France and England. Cervantes used its form for the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, combining the picaresque spirit with that of the tales of chivalry, produced the first realistic romance. Many lesser writers were content to follow Lazarillo's lead without such independent ingenuity. They brought up their literary children to be heroes after Lazarillo's fashion and were proud to have him as a godfather. In their hands the rogue novel retained its form and gained only a multiplicity of incident, a hundred writers earnestly devising new swindles and more exciting adventures for the hero, whose personality under all their buffetings remained constant to its original characteristics. No nation has shown more fertility in fancy than the Spanish. We owe to Spain half the trap-door excitements, half the eavesdropping discoveries, half the ingenious plots and counter-plots of the theatre. And when we remember that for a hundred and fifty years the rogue novel had been one of the most popular forms of Spanish literature, we need not wonder that Le Sage, in turning over volume after volume of the lives of Spanish rascals, should find that the Spanish language was an Open Sesame to an Ali Baba's cave of opulent invention. Just as a hundred forgotten trouveurs chanted the tales of the _Morte Darthur_, before Malory made from their songs the epic that we know, so the rogue novel had seeded and repeated itself again and again, before it met its great man who seized the vitality of a hundred bantlings to make a breeched book.

[Its culmination in Le Sage.]

Just as Malory was not a Frenchman but an Englishman, so Le Sage was not a Spaniard but a Frenchman, and a Frenchman in a very different age from that which produced his models. The

'Stately Spanish galleons Sailing from the Isthmus, Dipping through the tropics by the palm green shores, With cargoes of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts, Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores,'[5]

no longer brought the wealth of the Incas to Cadiz and Barcelona, but had been burnt as firewood in the cabins on the Irish coast. The Elizabethan age had come and gone. Cervantes had been dead a hundred years. Molière had brought comedy to the French stage. Watteau was painting, and Boileau was formulating the eighteenth-century code of letters, when in a little garden summer-house behind a Paris street, Le Sage sat at his desk, dipped through Spanish books, and wrote with a light heart of the people that he knew, disguised in foreign clothes, and moving in places he had never seen. He made his travels by his own fireside, and the contrast between Cervantes' active life and his peaceable _Galatea_ is no greater than that between the adventurous Gil Blas and Le Sage's sedentary industry. His lack of personal experience left him very free in the handling of his material, and made him just the man to recast the old adventures of a century before, to translate them, spilling none of their vitality, to a later time, to fill them out with a more delicate fancy, to finish them with a more fastidious pen, and to build from them a new and delicious French book, Spanish in colouring, but wholly Parisian in appeal.

Gil Blas is a Frenchman in a Spanish cloak, Le Sage, as he imagined himself under the tattered mantle of Lazarillo. His disguise left him doubly licensed for the criticism of contemporary France. He was of low estate, so that he could see things from below, upside down, and comment upon them. His circumstances were Spanish, so that he could observe French things, call them by Spanish names, and laugh at them without being inexcusably impertinent. He had also a very excellent technique. Le Sage had read La Bruyère and La Bruyère's translation of Theophrastus, and was the better able to allow his hero to take the hint from Lazarillo, and use his autobiography as an outlet for his social satire. Everything that Lazarillo had done, Gil Blas did in a larger and more skilful fashion. The book summed up the rogue novels in itself, and in its own right brought their influence to bear on English narrative. Smollett translated it, and it shares with _Don Quixote_ the parentage of the masculine novel.

THE ELIZABETHANS

THE ELIZABETHANS

[The new conditions of professional story-telling.]

PROFESSIONAL story-tellers before the sixteenth century seem very far removed from the novelists of our circulating libraries. Theirs was a simpler patronage; they had but to please one rich man, and they could live. The invention of printing made them leap suddenly into the conditions of modernity. It changed the audience of the castle hall into the audience of the world, and patrons into the public. A man told his stories in his own room. He was not sure of a single listener; he might have ten thousand without raising his voice or pressing harder with his pen. Poets might write for their friends or the Court; but Elizabethan story-tellers were already able to exist by writing for the booksellers. Middlemen were between their audience and themselves. They had no chance of excusing the defects of their wares by charm of voice or charm of personality, unless they could get that charm on paper. The characteristics of modern story-telling were rapidly appearing; already, as in the case of _Euphues_, a single book might set the fashion for a thousand; already the novelist felt his audience through his sales. Men like Greene, swift 'yarkers up' of pamphlets, had to write what the Elizabethan public wanted--with the result that there is very little purely English story-telling of the period. The Elizabethans wanted silks and gold from overseas. They fell in love with what was new and strange. They were hungry for all countries but their own, and for all times but those in which they lived. There never were such thieves. They stole from Spain, from France, from Italy, from Portugal, and, curiously mixing impudence and awe, copied crudely and continually from a newly discovered antiquity.

[Elizabethan borrowings.]

There was _Paynter's Pallace_, peopled with characters from the love-tales of France and Italy, in whose adventures Elizabethan playwrights found a score of plots. And then there was _Pettie's Pallace_, with its delightful title, _A petite Pallace of Pettie his pleasure_, that shows how late our language lost its French. Pettie steals his tales from the classics, with a most engaging air of right of way. Wherever the Elizabethans went they carried their heads high and were not abashed. They were ready to nod to Cæsar, call Endymion a Johnny-head-in-air, and clink a glass in honour of Ulysses. All the world was so new that Antiquity seemed only yesterday. Classical allusion was used with the most lavish hand. Progne, inveighing against her husband, explains his iniquity as follows:--

'He sheweth his cursed cruel kind, he plainly proves himself to proceed of the progeny of that traitor Aeneas, who wrought the confusion of Queen Dido, who succoured him in his distress. It is evident he is engendered of Jason's race, who disloyally forsook Medea that made him win the golden fleece! He is descended of the stock of Demophoon, who through his faithless dealing forced Phyllis to hang herself! He seems of the seed of Theseus, who left Ariadne in the deserts to be devoured, through whose help he subdued the monster Minotaur, and escaped out of the intricate labyrinth! He cometh of Nero his cruel kind, who carnally abused his own mother Agrippina, and then caused her to be slain and ripped open, that he might see the place wherein he lay being an infant in her belly! So that what but filthiness is to be gathered of such grafts? What boughs but beastliness grow out of such stems?'

And yet, quite undismayed by such family connections, so intimate was he with antiquity, the story-teller sums up the deeds of his characters as though he were a prosecuting counsel, and they even now cowering in the dock before him.

'It were hard here, Gentlewoman, for you to give sentence, who more offended of the husband or the wife, seeing the doings of both the one and the other near in the highest degree of devilishness--such unbridled lust and beastly cruelty in him, such monstrous mischief and murder in her; in him such treason, in her such treachery; in him such falseness, in her such furiousness; in him such devilish desire, in her such revengeful ire; in him such devilish heat, in her such haggish hate, that I think them both worthy to be condemned to the most bottomless pit in hell.'

[Lyly writes for women.]

There is something in the style of this, as well as in the address to a female reader, that suggests the _Euphues_ of John Lyly, published two years later. Lyly, alchemist of Spanish magniloquence into English euphuism, who settled the style of the Elizabethan romance, and brought into it many elements still characteristic of English story-telling, wrote as well as his letter to 'Gentlemen Readers,' and to his 'verrie good friends, the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford,' Epistles dedicatory to women--'To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England, John Lyly wisheth what they would.' They were grateful to him, and since he said that he would rather 'lye shut in a Ladye's Casket, then open in a Scholler's studie,' there was scarce a gentlewoman in London but knew much of him by heart, addressed her husband or lover in terms his Lucia might have used, and woke nearly as eager to read in him as in her looking-glass. His was a very modern success. Then, too, the end of all his tales was high morality. He winds up each with a reflection, and like most English story-telling, they contain more of the Warning Example than of the Embroidered Exploit. He reminds the 'Gentlewoemen of England' that he has 'diligently observed that there shall be nothing found that may offend the chaste mind with unseemly tearmes or uncleanly talke.' And yet he wrote of love a hundred years before the eighteenth century, and throughout those hundred years, and for some fifty afterwards, the chaste mind was to be almost disregarded. Mrs. Aphra Behn was to pour forth what Swinburne called her 'weltering sewerage,' and Fielding and Smollett were to write, before the chaste mind was to exert any very lasting influence on literature. Fielding and Smollett wrote for men, while, like an earlier Richardson, 'could Euphues take the measure of a woman's minde, as the Tailour doth of hir bodie, he would go as neere to fit them for a fancie as the other doth for a fashion.' Elizabethan women must have been less squeamish than their descendants on the subject of themselves. For in this book planned to fit them, Lyly writes like an Elizabethan Schopenhauer:--'Take from them their periwigges, their paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.' That is the gentle art of being rude, in which so much of early wit consisted. But, as it was designed as a 'Cooling Carde for Philautus and all fond lovers,' whose affections were misplaced or unrequited, the women, accepting not without pride responsibility for the disease, must have found it easy to forgive him and to smile at so impotent a cure.

[Euphuism.]

The style of Euphues had a much wider influence than his matter. Like Pettie's, it is precious, but with a preciousness at the same time so elaborate and infectious that I am finding it difficult even now, in thinking about it, to keep from imitating it. Its principle is a battledore-and-shuttlecock motion, in which the sense, sometimes a little bruised, is kept up between similar sounds or words that are not quite puns but nearly so. An idea that could be expressed in a single very short sentence is expanded as long as the breath lasts, or longer, by the insertion of separate contrasts, like those used in the intermediate lines of one of the forms of Japanese poetry. There was something of this in Pettie's peroration that was quoted three paragraphs ago; and here is an example from Lyly:--'Alas, Euphues, by how much the more I love the high clymbing of thy capacitie, by so much the more I feare thy fall.' (There is the idea; all that follows is its embroidery.) 'The fine Christall is sooner erased then the hard Marble; the greenest Beech burneth faster then the dryest Oke; the fairest silke is soonest soyled; and the sweetest wine tourneth to the sharpest Vinegar. The Pestilence doth most infect the clearest complection, and the Caterpiller cleaveth into the ripest fruite: the most delycate witte is allured with small enticement unto vice, and most subject to yeelde unto vanitie.'

['Cruditie and indigestion.']

Such a style could not but attract a newly educated people, still able to marvel at knowledge. Its lavishness of information is comparable to that generosity of gold and precious gems that has been noticed as characteristic of the writers of the _Mabinogion_. The Briton wondered at wealth, the Elizabethan at learning. It is not surprising that in this state of civilisation a fact-laden style should be brought to perfection. 'It is a sign of cruditie and indigestion,' says Montaigne, 'for a man to yeelde up his meat even as he swallowed the same: the stomach hath not wrought his full operation unlesse it have changed forme and altered fashion of that which was given him to boyle and concoct.' In Elizabethan England, when knowledge was so new and so delightful that men did not scruple to invent it, it is easy to imagine John Lyly writing with a huge Bestiary open to the left of him, and a classical dictionary open to the right, from which he might dig out metaphors learned and ingenious, and present them immediately to his readers without putting any undue strain on his own intellectual digestion.

[Lyly's followers.]

His imitators were no less numerous than his readers. If they could not write they talked his peculiar language. If they were novelists they wrote in something like his manner, and with cheerful consciences used his name as a trade-mark to attract his popularity to themselves. Lodge's _Rosalynde_ is introduced as _Euphues' Golden Legacie_, and many other stories were connected by some ingenious silken thread to Lyly's garlanded triumphal car. It is too easy to laugh at euphuism. It was the first prophecy of the ordered poetic prose in which such delicate work has been done in our own time. In the hands of Lodge and Greene, who tempered it with homelier periods, it showed at once its possibilities of beauty. Nor with Lyly was it continued pedantry. A golden smile appears sometimes beneath the mask. Euphues, crossing to England, tells the story of Callimachus to Philautus and the sailors, and when he says, 'You must imagine (because it were too long to tell all his journey) that he was Sea-sick (as thou beginnest to be, Philautus),' we perceive that Lyly is not always to be hidden behind his sentences. The stories he introduces, the tale of Callimachus and Cassander, or the pretty history of old Fidus and his Issida, are as pleasant as the tales of Lodge and Greene.

How near he was to being a story-teller may be seen from the work of these two men. They tried to imitate him in everything; but Greene wrote in a hurry for the press, and you could not expect Lodge, writing on the high seas, to be as consistently euphuistical as an Oxford gentleman, holding an appointment from Lord Burleigh, and having nothing else to do. Euphuism fell away from both journalist and sailor, leaving a pleasant glow over their style. They were more intent than Lyly on the plain forwarding of the narrative. For the long rhetorical harangues they substituted shorter, simpler speeches to express the feelings of their characters. The harangue was a step from the bald statement that so-and-so 'made great dole,' and these shorter speeches were a further step from the by no means bald declamations on the subject of the dole, towards the working up of emotion by a closer copy of the action and dialogue in which emotion expresses itself. Dialogue was yet to be introduced from the theatre. In Lyly it meant argument, but in the best of his imitators it had become already a tool imperfectly understood but sometimes used for the actual progress of the tale.

Greene and Lodge illustrate very well the characteristics of Elizabethan story-telling. _Pandosto_, _Rosalynde_, and some of Greene's confessions let us know pretty clearly what it was that the public of the day found interesting. Greene was a Bohemian, 'with a jolley red peaked beard' who could 'yark up a pamphlet in a single night,' and do it so well that the booksellers were glad to pay 'for the very dregs of his wit.' Lodge was an undergraduate at Oxford, a pirate, and later a very successful physician. Both were, like their audiences, exceedingly alive.

[Romance and confession.]

In Greene's _Pandosto_ we find reminiscences of old romance, classical nomenclature, the influence of the Italian _novelle_, and plenty of the wild improbability that still had power over his audience. _Pandosto_ is a love pamphlet, and after a euphuistic dedication and a little preface on jealousy, 'from which oft ensueth bloody revenge as this ensuing history manifestly proveth,' Greene leads off with, 'In the country of Bohemia there reigned a king called Pandosto.' Bohemia is an island--no matter. Pandosto, in a most obliging manner, 'to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,' slays himself at the finish--no matter again. We must remember that for the Elizabethans, fortunate people who believed in the Lamia and the Boas, probability and improbability had no existence as relative terms. Everything was credible, and one of the joys of romance reading was the exercise of an athletic faith. Another was the gathering of knowledge, and Greene met this demand with books whose breathings of realism illustrate, like Nash's _Jacke Wilton_, the rogue novel in England, and give his name a double importance. These other books were more personal to their writer, and depend more closely on his own life and character. Greene was a wild liver with a conscience. He enjoyed debauch and the company of rogues better than virtue and the society of sober citizens. But his conscience oscillated between hibernation and wakefulness with a periodicity that corresponded to the fulness and emptiness of his purse, and in times of poverty and righteousness he wrote confessions of his own misdoing, and books on the methods of rapscallions with whom he consorted, that brought him the money to continue on his riotous career, and satisfied the curiosity of his public as well as his romances had delighted their imaginations.

Lodge, although his work was also various, appealed mainly to the latter.

'Roome for a souldier and a sailer that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrote, in the ocean, when everie line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion countercheckt with a storme. If you like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duetie, if you be mine in favour. But if Momus, or any squinteied asse, that hath mighty eares to conceive with Midas, and yet little reason to judge, if he come abord our barke to find fault with the tackling, when hee knowes not the shrowds, Ile down into the hold, and fetch out a rustie pollax, that sawe no sunne this seaven yeare, and either well bebast him, or heave the cockescombe over boord to feed cods. But curteous gentlemen, that favour most, backbite none, and pardon what is overslipt, let such come and welcome; Ile into the stewards roome, and fetch them a kanne of our best bevradge.'

[_As You Like It._]

That is the way in which Thomas Lodge, newly returned to England from piracies on the western seas, introduces his _Rosalynde_. With such a preface, you would expect a ruffianly tale, full of hard knocks and coarse words, certainly not the dainty little pastoral, romantic fairy story, found in Euphues' cell, and holding lessons of much profit for the guidance of his friend's children. The very contrast between its buccaneering author and its own fragility is the same as that between the pastoral writers and their books, between, for example, Cervantes of Lepanto and the author of the _Galatea_, between the Sidney who died at Zutphen and the author of _Arcadia_. It is the tale of _As You Like It_, and Shakespeare, in turning it into a play, chose the right title for it, since it contains every one of the surest baits with which to hook an Elizabethan audience. It was brought from overseas, and in that time when ships were sailing up to London Bridge with all the new-found riches of the world, the hint of travel was a sufficient promise of delight. It begins with a dying knight who leaves a legacy between his sons, and its audience had not yet tired of Sir Bevis and Sir Isumbras. It has the fairy-tale notion of the youngest born, and was not England youngest son of all the world? There are beautiful women in it, and one of them dresses like a man--a delicious, romantic thing to dream upon. And finally, is it not left by Euphues himself, and therefore full of profit as of pleasure, of wit as of wisdom, and written in something not too far from that embroidered manner, as dear to the Elizabethans as their new won luxuries, their newly imported frivolities.

THE PASTORAL

THE PASTORAL

[The discovery and exploitation of Arcadia.]

THE Pastoral, whose influence touches even the Elizabethan novels not professedly Arcadian, had been fished up from sunken antiquity by the early scholars of the Renaissance. They were fascinated by the serene country pieces of Virgil, and the leafy embroideries of Theocritus, and were, of course, too newly learned, too eager for the name of learning, to be able to apply the old form to their own material. Instead, they did their best to write not only in a classical manner, but also of a classical country. They used Greek names, Latin names, any but homespun names of their own times. It was not on purpose that Arcadia was set by them in the Golden Age; they had aimed at a century more prosaic. The best time of all the world had a date for them, and they did their best to live up to its particular antiquity. But in using conventions so different from real life, in a time of hurry and stress, it was natural that they should be led into daydreams of a greater simplicity than their own elaborate existence. It was natural, too, that by refining character, tempering the wind, and keeping the year at its sweetest season, they should end in the making of books that were beyond all measure artificial. From the time of Boccaccio to the time of Cervantes these books had multiplied, and become more and more like arrangements of marionettes in landscapes dotted with Noah's Ark trees, until, when the curate in Don Quixote's library defends them to the niece and calls them 'ingenious books that can do nobody any prejudice,' the niece hurriedly replies, 'Oh! good sir, burn them with the rest I beseech you; for should my uncle get cured of his knight-errant frenzy, and betake himself to the reading of these books, we should have him turn shepherd, and so wander through the woods and fields; nay, and what would be worse yet, turn poet, which they say is a catching and incurable disease.'

[Shepherds' plaints.]

The niece was right, for when shepherds love sweet shepherdesses, it seems that for the benefit of a Renaissance public they must pour their sorrows out in verse, as elegant and classical as may be. No sooner does one shepherd begin his song than another joins him and another, until there is a chorus of complaining lovers; the infection is so virulent that it leaps from man to man, and if a shepherd-boy breathe a poem to his lass, it is great odds that she will cap it with another, and then they will keep it up between them like a shuttlecock. The disease is so strong indeed that if poor Corydon has no one to cross Muses with, it forces Echo herself to answer him in rhyme:--

'In what state was I then, when I took this deadly disease? Ease. And what manner of mind which had to that humour a vain? Vain. Hath not reason enough vehemence to desire to reprove? Prove. Oft prove I but what salve when reason seeks to begone? One. Oh! what is it? what is it that may be a salve to my love? Love. What do lovers seek for long seeking for to enjoy? Joy. What be the joys for which to enjoy they went to the pains? Pains. Then to an earnest love what doth best victory end? End.'

These lines are from Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_, which, of course, was not in the Knight's library. We are told in advance that they are hexameters. How delightfully they scan:--

- ˘ ˘ | - - | - - | - - | - ˘ ˘ | - 'What do lov | ers seek | for long | seeking | for to en | joy? - Joy.'

On the next page a shepherdess 'threw down the burden of her mind in Anacreon's kind of verses.' And 'Basilius, when she had fully ended her song, fell prostrate upon the ground and thanked the gods they had preserved his life so long as to hear the very music they themselves had used in an earthly body.' Presently follows a copy of 'Phaleuciaks,' and then Dorus 'had long he thought kept silence from saying something which might tend to the glory of her, in whom all glory to his seeming was included, but now he broke it, singing those verses called Asclepiadiks.' And they thought the night had passed quickly.

[An apology to Sidney.]

This is no insult to Sir Philip Sidney, but only to the rather exorbitant demands of the form he had chosen. His own sonnets vindicate him as a poet, and some of them, even Hazlitt owned, who did not like him, 'are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxurious like it.' Sidney lets us see his own attitude in that splendid sentence which begins, 'Certainly I must confesse my own barbarousnes, I neuer heard the olde song of _Percy_ and _Duglas_ that I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blinde Crouder, with no rougher voyce then rude stile'; I should be almost sorry that he finished it by saying 'which, being so euill apparrelled in the dust and cobwebbes of that vnciuill age, what would it worke trymmed in the gorgeous eloquence of _Pindar_?' but that it rings with the sincerity of his classicism. Taste has changed, and now we find his 'barbarousnes' in the question rather than in the confession. But the sentence illustrating at once his sensitiveness to simplicity and his predilection for the classics, shows how genuine was the expression that the busy, chivalric diplomatist found for himself in the confines of Arcadia. The classic metres brought as near as might be our Tudor English to 'the language of the Gods.'

[The slow progress of Arcadian narrative.]

The continual downpour of poetry, the Arcadian substitute for rain, was not the only drag on the narrative of the pastoral story-tellers. Serenity was considered essential, and so, while the story was being everlastingly shunted, so that the lovesick shepherds might plain, it had also for every step it took forward to take another back in order to catch again the chosen atmosphere of lovesick repose. The result was 'a note of linked sweetness long drawn out,' a series of agitated standstills, and a narrative impossible to end. Cervantes' _Galatea_ was never finished; the last books of _Arcadia_ were written by another hand; d'Urfé died before putting an end to _l'Astrée_; and Montemor abandoned his _Diana_.

In the history of story-telling it is not the form of the pastoral that is important, but the motive that gave it its popularity. We begin to understand the motive when we notice that it became the fashion to hide real people under the names of Corydon and Phyllis, and to put ribboned crooks and silver horns into the hands of enemies and friends. At first it was the genuine feeling that made Boccaccio enshrine his Fiammetta; at the end it degenerated into mere privy gossip and books uninteresting without their keys; but in general it was simply a desire of flattering elaborate people into thinking themselves of simple heart. [The motive of the Pastoral.] The pastorals were like the paintings of Watteau and Lancret, where we find the ladies of a lively court playing innocent games under the trees, while, if we searched in the brushwood, we should find in the soft earth under the brambles the hoofmarks of the sporting satyrs. The feelings of author and subjects were those of the Vicar of Wakefield's family when they sat before the portrait painter:--'Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon, sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green Joseph richly laced with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing.' Elizabethan ladies liked to think of themselves sitting on banks garlanding flowers, troubled only by the sweet difficulties of love, and with innumerable sheep, since the writer was able to put them in so very inexpensively.

[Poussin's _Les Bergers d'Arcadie_.]

There is another artist who, living before Cervantes and Sidney were dead, gives in his pictures, cleaner and sweeter than Watteau, an idea of the pastoral spirit. You can imagine one of Watteau's shepherdesses using paint. It would be impossible to suspect the same of one of Sidney's, or of one of Nicolas Poussin's, that solemn, sweet-minded man who was shocked as if by sacrilege at Scarron's irreverent treatment of Virgil. There is in the Louvre (how many times have I been to see it) a picture called 'Les Bergers d'Arcadie.' Hazlitt mentions it, most inaccurately as to facts, but most precisely as to feeling, in his essay on the painter:[6]--'But above all, who shall celebrate in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going out on a fine morning in the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription: _Et Ego in Arcadia vixi!_ The eager curiosity of some, the expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, "the valleys low where the mild zephyrs use," the distant, uninterrupted, sunny prospects speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come!'

In those sentences Hazlitt, who found the written pastoral dull, shows us the very secret of its life. In trying to copy the classic country writing, it came to be an attempt to reconstruct the time that has always been past since the beginning of the world. Real shepherds never do and never did show fear and surprise and eager curiosity on their weather-beaten faces; but then in Arcadia is no rain. Sweet, sunny days, soft, peaceful nights, green grass, white sheep, and smooth-cheeked shepherds Grecian limbed; the whole is the convention of a dream. It was the dream of busy men in close touch with a life whose end was apt to come short and sharp between the lifting of a flagon and putting the lips to it. And in Sidney's dream especially, there is something of the true Renaissance worship of the ancient gods. Sidney's dream was of a pastoral life; yes, but to him other things in it were more important than its rusticity. For him, at least, it must be a life where the goatfoot god still moved in the green undergrowth, where Diana hunted the white fawns, while Silenus tippled in the valley, and Apollo looked serenely from the wooded hill.

[Conventional and realistic art.]

This was the same art as that of Malory, though not that of the chansons or the sagas. It is the art in which life is simplified into a convention, and human figures worked into a tapestry. The pastoral romances are duller than those of chivalry, partly, no doubt, because their conventions are not home-made but taken as strictly as possible from another civilisation, and partly because they are too long for their motives--the pattern is repeated too often. But they do not represent a dead or a dying art, but rather a stage in the infancy of an art that has blossomed in our own day, in some of the work of Théophile Gautier, for example; in Mr. Nevinson's _Plea of Pan_, in some of the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Sidney's _Arcadia_ is terribly unwieldy, but passage after passage in it breathes a fragrance different from anything in the literature of realism.

Indeed it is well to mark thus early the distinction between these two arts, the one that seeks to show us our own souls, the other that shows us life, that one that, using symbols disentangled from ordinary existence, can legitimately fill books with things beautiful in themselves, and the other that reconciles us to ugliness by showing us some vital interest, some hidden loveliness, some makeshift beauty in things as they generally are. The spirit of the one set statues of lovely forms in the bedchambers of the Grecian women, the spirit of the other praises ugly babies to their mothers. Both spirits have shown their right to be by the works of art whose inspiration they have been. We must only be careful not to criticise the art of the one by the canons that rule the art of the other. There are two worlds, the actual and the ideal. If Tom Jones were to open a door by saying 'Open Sesame' to it, we should have a right to laugh, just as we should be legitimately disappointed if Ali Baba were to turn a key and enter the robber's treasury in the ordinary way. We cannot blame the Arcadian shepherds because they are not like the shepherds we meet about the hills, any more than we can blame that little kitchen slut called Cinderella for riding to a king's ball in a gold chariot made of a pumpkin. Truth to an ideal is all we may ask of dreams. And the pastorals, in spite of their borrowed conventions, do hold an ideal, suffocated though it sometimes is under an impossible technique, and the weight of ornament which is so tempting to those who have but newly learned the secrets of its manufacture.

[Poetic prose.]

Our later Arcadians have not so hampered themselves. They have made short stories instead of labyrinthine narratives, and they have been able, as Sidney tried to do, to disclaim any competition with utilitarian homespun literature by the use of a poetic prose. In the prose of Sidney's _Arcadia_, imitated from that of Lyly, but a little less noisily eccentric, falling perhaps too often between poetry and prose, we can see the promise of that new prose of ornament perfected by the artists of the nineteenth century, a prose firm, unshaken by the recurrent rhythms of verse, but richer in colour and melody than the prose of use.

CERVANTES

CERVANTES

[Prologue.]

IT is curious how many odds and ends may be heaped together and woven into a patchwork of thought, by a mind concentrating itself upon one idea, and, as if in spite of itself, making excursions after each chance butterfly and puff of wind, each half promise of real or phantom value it perceives. The mind returns continually to where it stood, bringing with it always something new, like a starling adding to its nest, until at last the original idea is so covered over with half visualised images, half clarified obscurities, dimly comprehended notions, that it is itself no longer to be seen but by a reverse process of picking away and throwing aside, one by one, the accretions that have been brought to it by the adventuring mind. For the last hour I have been sitting in my easy-chair, a cup of tea at my elbow, a pipe in my mouth, a good fire at my feet, trying not to let myself stray too far from the consideration of Cervantes and his place in the history of story-telling. All that hour, without effort, almost against my will, my mind has been playing about the subject, and bringing straw and scraps of coloured cloth, until now the plain notion of Cervantes is dotted over and burdened with a dozen other things--a comparison between an active life and a bookish one, the relation between parody and progress, the mingling of rogue novel and romance, Sir Walter Scott, and the remembrance of a band of Spanish village musicians. Perhaps if I disentangle this superstructure piece by piece Cervantes himself will become as visible as he intends to allow me to present him.

* * * * *

[An active life and a bookish one.]

Cervantes was one of the men who write books in two languages; in literature and in life. Indeed, his contribution to his country's history is scarcely less vivid than his share in the history of story-telling. Cervantes the soldier, losing the use of his hand in the naval battle of Lepanto, in which he took so glorious a part that the grandiloquent Spanish tradition attributed to him, a mere private soldier, more than half the merit of the victory, is quite as attractive as Cervantes the impecunious author, writing plays for the theatre and poems for the nobility, collecting taxes for the king, pleasing himself with his _Galatea_, and laying literature under an international debt to him for his _Exemplary Novels_ and his _Don Quixote_. Like Sir Philip Sidney, he won admiration from his contemporaries as much for his personal worth as for his intellect. The maimed hand meant to them and him as much as any printed books. His own life was as romantic as his romance. Wherever he had found himself, boarding a Turkish galley, plotting for freedom in the prisons of Algiers, he had played the game as stirringly as d'Artagnan. Don Quixote's patriotism was no more obstinate and glamorous than his, and Sancho Panza's wisdom was gained in no school of harder knocks.

It is not without significance that his first book should be a specimen of pastoral romance. The _Galatea_ bears no closer relation to workaday life than Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_. This old soldier began his career as a man of letters by trying to settle upon an estate in Arcady, the very country whose cardboard foliage he was afterwards to ridicule, and the last book he wrote, in spite of the humaner work that had preceded it, was a romance not dissimilar from his first. Partly this must have been due to the fashion of the time; but it is not extravagant to find in it an illustration of the wistful manner in which men write about their opposites. Men like Stevenson, caged in sick rooms, may love to be buccaneers on paper. The real adventurers set the balance even by imagining themselves tending sheep on a smooth grassy slope.

[_Don Quixote_ no parody.]

Cervantes' _Galatea_ is not a great work. Its shepherds weep more than Sir Philip Sidney's, and sing considerably worse. But it had its success, and Cervantes was never anything but proud of it, a fact that should not be forgotten in remembering his _Don Quixote_. _Don Quixote_ has often been described as a parody of the heroic and pastoral romances, which indeed had become a little foolish. But Cervantes was not the man to jeer at what he loved. Instead, he fills the old skins that had held the wine of dreams with the new wine of experience. He did not parody the old romances, but re-wrote them in a different way. Parody laughs and writes a full stop; the art of Cervantes, Fielding, and Rabelais ends always in a hyphen, a sign that allows all manner of developments.

[The picaresque form.]

Cervantes, like Shakespeare, used all the resources of his time, and did not disdain to profit by other men's experiments. _Don Quixote_ owed a triple debt to the common-sensible humorous rogue novel invented seventy years before, as well as to the more serious tales of knights and pastoral life that made his existence possible. Thieves and shepherds and paragons of chivalry assisted at his birth. The thieves in particular were responsible for the design, or lack of design, in the construction of the book. The rogue novels were made by stringing a series of disconnected 'merry quips' along the autobiography or biography of a disreputable hero. They were like Punch and Judy shows. The character of Punch is as stable as his red nose or his hump back. His deeds do not change him, and, so long as he is always well in the front of his stage we ask for no other connecting thread in the entertainment than his habit of punctuating his conversation with a well-directed log of wood. Let him continue his villainous career, let his squeaking inhuman voice continue to exult, and we are perfectly contented. It was so with the rogues, and it is so with _Don Quixote_. As the Bachelor says, 'many of those that love mirth better than melancholy, cry out, give us more Quixoteries: let but Don Quixote lay on, and Sancho talk, be it what it will, we are satisfied.'

[Rogue novel and romance.]

Three hundred years after the Bachelor, we too are satisfied with Sancho's chatter, and his master's Quixoteries, because they are both pretty closely connected with humanity. If Don Quixote is among the clouds, Sancho Panza sits firm upon his donkey, and between the two of them the book itself moves spaciously upon a mellowed earth. There is a perpetual interplay between dignity and impudence, the ridiculous and the sublime, and the partners, as if at tennis, lend vigour and give opportunity to each other. Sancho is not a mere village bellyful of common sense, whose business is to make the Knight of the Doleful Countenance appear ridiculous. He, too, has his delusions; he, too, prefers sometimes those two birds twittering distantly in the bush; Romance, smilingly enough, has touched his puzzled forehead also. And Don Quixote, with ideals no less noble than those of Amadis of Gaul or Don Belianis of Greece, with notions of life no less exaggerated than those in the interminable pastorals, is yet a man of blood and bone. His ideals and notions are properly fleshed, and are in the book as a soul in a body. _Don Quixote_ is a book of dreams set upon earth, and earthly shrewdness reaching vainly after dreams. The rogue novels and the romances were, either of them, the one without the other.

[The ideal not spoilt by the reality.]

We see Don Quixote's adventures with the realist's eye of disillusion, and find that external perfection does not matter to our dreams. ''Tis not the deed but the intent.' The gorgeous charger of the knight of chivalry is become a poor old starveling hack that should have been horsemeat these dozen years. Mambrino's helmet is but a barber's bason after all. Lancelot's Guinevere is Dulcinea of the Mill. Her feet are large and her shoulders one higher than the other. The castle is a wayside inn, the routed army a flock of luckless sheep. The goatherds do not talk after the fashion of the Court, like those in _Galatea_; but, 'with some coarse compliment, after the country way, they desired Don Quixote to sit down upon a trough with the bottom upwards.' Gone are the rose-flecked cloudy pinnacles of dawn; we know them now for drenching rain. And yet--the play's the thing, and is not judged by its trappings, but by its beating heart. Not one scene in the Romances, not one glimpse of the Happy Valley in the Pastorals, has ever moved us like this book, which is so near life that when we close it we seem not to have flown on an enchanted carpet from a thousand leagues away, but to have stepped merely from one room to another of our own existence.

[The _Exemplary Novels_.]

The _Exemplary Novels_ were begun before _Don Quixote_, and published afterwards. They are examples rather of a form in story-telling than of any particular piety. Cervantes was, he tells us, 'the first to essay novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many novels which go about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages, while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.' He took the form of the Italian short story, not the episode but the _nouvelle_, the little novel that had inspired the Elizabethans. He took this form and filled it with his own material, told in his own manner. In thinking of that manner I am reminded of the band of Spanish village musicians who seemed at first to have no obvious connection with my subject. There were perhaps a dozen of them grouped on the stage of a London music hall, and they played small windy tunes, occasionally blaring out with trumpets, using a musical scale entirely different from our own. I remembered a Japanese I had heard playing on a bamboo flute, and then the semitones of a little henna-stained flageolet from Kairouan. For theirs was Eastern music, and I wondered if these Spaniards still owed their scale to the old rulers of Granada. They set me thinking whether the peculiar movement of Cervantes' narrative had not also an Eastern origin. The facts favour the supposition. Up to the battle of Lepanto the Turks were so far a ruling nation as to be the supreme sea-power; until even later the most likely of incidents for the use of the story-teller was that which happened to Cervantes himself--capture by a Moslem pirate and imprisonment in Algiers. Only a hundred years had passed since the Moors had been driven from Granada. It would indeed be surprising if in Cervantes' work we found no sign of Eastern influence. 'I tell it you,' quoth Sancho of his tale, 'as all stories are told in my country, and I cannot for the blood of me tell it in any other way, nor is it fit I should alter the custom.' Many characteristics of Cervantes' narrative remind us that he was writing in a country only recently freed from the Moors, and in a time when it took the united forces of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy to beat the Turks at sea.

[Oriental story-telling.]

Cervantes is not ignorant, for example, of the literary trick of letting his heroes quote from the poets, after the engaging, erudite manner of the heroes of the _Arabian Nights_. Sancho Panza's conversation is an anthology of those short wisdom-laden maxims that had been the staple of Hebrew and Arabic literature. 'Set a hen upon an egg'; 'While a man gets he never can lose'; 'Where there is no hook, to be sure there can hang no bacon'; shrewd Ali and careful Hakim exchange such sentences to-day in the market-places of the East. But these are small things and beside the main point. I want to suggest that Cervantes had caught, whether in his Algerine prison, or in his Morocco-Spanish Spain, the yarning, leisurely, humanity-laden, unflinching atmosphere of Oriental story-telling. The form of the _nouvelle_, Eastern in origin, had been passed on from Naples to Paris and to London, without noticeable improvement, but it seems to me that now in Spain it met the East again, and was accordingly recreated. It is just the element of Eastern narrative, accidental in the genius of Cervantes, that makes his examples of that form so infinitely more important than those of the English Elizabethans. Scott told Lockhart that the reading of the _Exemplary Novels_ first turned his mind to the writing of fiction, and in Scott there is precisely the mood of uninterruptible story-telling that Cervantes shares with the Princess Scherazada.

The novels are delightful specimens of ambling, elaborate narrative, full of the easiest, most confident knowledge of humanity, illustrating with serene clarity a point of view that is to-day as refreshing as it is surprising. The happy endings, when the seducer falls in love at sight on meeting the seduced of years before, and satisfies all her scruples, and turns her sorrow to unblemished joy by marrying her, show an ethic of respectability no less assured than Richardson's. They are enriched by passages whose observation is as minute as Fielding's. They are never tales about nothing. There is always meat on their bones. They are among the few stories that can be read on a summer afternoon under an apple-tree, for they will bear contact with nature, and are never in a hurry. Even if Cervantes had not written _Don Quixote_, the _Exemplary Novels_ would have assured him a place in the history of his art. There is no cleverness in them, any more than in the greater book. The whole body of Cervantes' work is an illustration of the impregnable advantage that plain humanity possesses over intellect.

[The portrait of Cervantes.]

And now, after these various questions for the schoolmen, questions to more than one of which the cautious man must answer with Sir Roger, that 'much might be said on both sides,' let us return to the old story-teller himself, who will survive by innumerable generations our little praises and discussions as he has lived benevolent and secure through the centuries that have already passed over his grave. The only authentic portrait of Cervantes is in his own words. A hundred artists have tried to supplement these words with paint, and their pictures have at least a family likeness. The portrait made by Miss Gavin after a careful comparison parison of many others represents very fairly the traditional Cervantes type, and does not materially belie the lineaments that he describes:--'He whom you here behold, with aquiline visage, with chestnut hair, smooth and unruffled brow, with sparkling eyes, and a nose arched though well proportioned, a silver beard, although not twenty years ago it was golden, large moustache, small mouth, teeth not important, for he has but six of them, and those in ill condition and worse placed because they do not correspond the one with the other, the body between two extremes, neither large nor small, the complexion bright, rather white than brown, somewhat heavy-shouldered, and not very nimble on his feet; this, I say, is the portrait of the author of the _Galatea_ and of _Don Quixote de la Mancha_.' That is the sort of statement of himself that an honest humorous man might make to a friend. Part of the satisfaction given by his books is due to the comfortable knowledge that there is a man behind them, a man who knew the world and had not frozen in it. Cervantes, for all his intimacy with life, never became worldly enough to believe in hatred. He assumed that all his readers were his friends, and made them so by the assumption.

* * * * *

[Epilogue.]

No: Cervantes is too simple a man to do anything but suffer in discussion. There are men whom you know well, who seem to elude you like the final mystery of metaphysics when you try to talk about them. My history and not Cervantes is the clearer for the rags and tatters of observation I have picked off him one by one. I had put them there myself. It was necessary, for the purposes of my book, to notice the Eastern character of his story-telling and his position between rogue novel and romance, but, now that it is done, I am glad to go back to him without pre-occupations. There is yet hot water in the kettle, and tea in the pot, and four hours to spend with _Don Quixote_ before I go to bed. Cervantes, at least, will bear me no malice, but tell me his story as simply as before I had tried to bring it into argument.

THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING

THE ESSAYISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO STORY-TELLING

[The Character.]

THE detailed, silver-point portrait studies of Fanny Burney, the miniatures of Jane Austen, and the stronger etchings of Fielding and Smollett, owed their existence to something outside the art of story-telling, something other than the grave, humorous pictures of Chaucer, or the hiding of real people under the homespun of lovesick shepherds, or the gay autobiographies of swindling rogues. They owed it to an art which in its beginnings seemed far enough away from any sort of narrative. In those happy, thievish times when plagiary was a virtue to be cried upon the housetops, this art, or rather this artistic form, had been, like much else, stolen from antiquity.

When literature was for the first time become a fashionable toy, and when, even at Court, a gallant or a soldier was far outmatched by a wit, the little book of _Theophrastus his Characters_ suggested a pastime that offered no less opportunity than poetry for the display of nimbleness and sparkling fancy. Life had become very diverse and elaborate, and how delightful to take one of its flowerings, one man, one woman, of a particular species, and exhibit it in a small space, in a select number of points and quips, each one barbed and sticking in the chosen target. Sir Thomas Overbury, trying to define the art he used so skilfully, said, in his clear way:--'To square out a character by our English levell, it is a picture (reall or personall) quaintly drawne, in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing. It is a quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close: it is wit's descant on any plaine song.' The thing had to be witty; it had to be short. A busy courtier could compose one in a morning while his barber was arranging his coiffure, and show it round in the afternoon for the delectation of his friends and the increase of his vanity. He could take a subject like 'A Woman,' and with quick sentences pin her to the paper like a butterfly on cork. Then he could take another title, like 'A Very Woman,' and repeat his triumph with another variety of the species. [Sir Thomas Overbury.] Sir Thomas Overbury, that charming, insolent, honest man, the friend of Somerset, venomously done to death by his Countess for having given too good advice to her husband, is perhaps the most notable of the early practitioners. He is not to be despised for his sage poem on the choice of a wife, but he is at his best in the making of these little portraits, like that of the 'Faire and happy Milk-mayd,' wherein, in accordance with his definition, he could polish each detail without jarring his musical close, and without nullifying the single shadowing designed to heighten the whole. The form was fitted to the times like their fashions in clothes. The Character belonged to that age, like the novel to the nineteenth century. Sir Thomas, as his title-page tells us, was assisted by 'other much learned gentlemen'; he was presently followed by a man as different from himself as gentle John Earle, Doctor of Divinity, and just such a student as an Inns of Court man like Sir Thomas would naturally despise. So general was the inclination of the age to portraiture.

[John Earle.]

With Earle we are nearer the drawing of individuals, and so to a tenderer touch on idiosyncrasies. He relies less on quaint conceits (though he has plenty of them and charming ones at command; witness the child whose 'father hath writ him as his owne little story, wherein hee reads those dayes of his life that hee cannot remember') and trusts more often to fragments of real observation. His Characters are not so consistently wit's descant on a plain song. He is often content to give us a plain descant on a plain song--less concerned with his cleverness than with his subjects. With Earle we are already some way from the age of Elizabeth, and indeed Overbury, though he was able to quarrel with Ben Jonson, and in spite of his Renaissance death, seems to have a part in a less youthful century. In his wisdom, in his wise advice unwisely given to his friend, there is something already of the flavour of Addison; an essence ever so slight of the sound morality of the periodical essayists whose work owed more than a little to his own.

[La Bruyère.]

The same impulse that suggested the pleasure and profit of collecting Londoners as Theophrastus had collected his Athenians, suggested also the noting of contemporary manners. Manners and Characters, especially since Characters meant peculiarities, belonged to each other. Overbury's 'Pyrate' is a picture of the times quite as much as of that sterling fellow they produced, to whom if you gave 'sea roome in never so small a vessell, like a witch in a sieve, you would think he were going to make merry with the devill.' And the portrait of 'The Faire and happy Milk-mayd' betrays in its painting more than a little of the artist and of the age in which she sat for him. This is true of the plain Character, unexpanded and unframed; it is still more true of the Character in the form it very speedily took. The Character became a paragraph in a discursive essay, and La Bruyère, who copied directly from Theophrastus, does not make series of separate portraits, but notices in his original less his picturing of types than his suggestion of their circumstances, dividing his own work into large sections, 'de la ville,' 'de la Cour,' 'des Biens de Fortune,' 'de la Société et de la Conversation,' where he seems to stroll slowly through a garden-walk of philosophy, pointing his remarks with his stick, and using such portraits as he cares to make to illustrate his general observations. His Characters are almost anecdotes. He is like the more advanced naturalist who, no longer content with his butterflies on cork and his stuffed birds stiff on perches, attempts to place them in the setting of their ordinary existence, where they may illustrate at once that existence and their own natures by some characteristic pose. How near is this to the desire of seeing them alive and in continuous action, which, if he had had it, would perhaps have made him combine his notes and sketches in a novel.

[The periodical essayists.]

The periodical essayists had La Bruyère, and Earle's _Microcosmography: A Piece of the World discovered in Essays and Characters_, and Sir Thomas Overbury with his much learned gentlemen, and Theophrastus, the father of them all, well in their memory. They too were collectors of Characters and observers of public morals and censurers of private follies. La Bruyère's aims with something more were theirs. Hazlitt's is so excellent a description of their work that I shall quote it instead of writing a stupid one. '_Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli_, is the general motto of this department of literature.... It makes familiar with the world of men and women, assigns their motives, exhibits their whims, characterises their pursuits in all their singular and endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their inconsistencies, "holds the mirror up to nature, and shows the very age and body of the time its form and pressure"; takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shows us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many coloured scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.' We might be listening to a description of the eighteenth century novel of manners. Fanny Burney would have recognised these pretensions for her secret own, though she might have blushed to see them so emblazoned.

[Minuteness of observation.]

_The Tatler_, _The Spectator_, _The Guardian_, and the rest of them, are like a long series of skirmishes in a determined campaign on the part of the essayists to cross the borderland of narrative. Their traditions, the Character, Montaigne, and Bacon, were very different from those of the story-tellers. The canvases prescribed for them were not huge things almost shutting out the sky, but a very small stock size, two or three pages only, to lie two days on coffee-house tables, and be used for wrapping butter on the third. The essayists were like men compelled to examine an elephant with a pocket microscope. Each subject, small as it was, hid all others for the moment, so that their observation made mountain peaks and ranges out of pimples and creases. These very limitations sharpened the weapons of their struggle, the weapons that were at last to be taken over by the novelists. The small canvas made carelessness impossible, and this compulsory attention to detail gave a new dignity to the trivialities that the novelists had so far overlooked.

[Mr. Bickerstaff.]

The very conception of these papers contained an accidental discovery of a possibility in fiction. _The Tatler_ was not written by Steele, or Swift, or Addison, or indeed by any one of its contributors, but by a Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, an oldish gentleman, a bachelor, a lover of children and discreet good fellowship, of an austere but kindly life, possessed by a pleasant, old-gentlemanly desire to better the manners of the town. This is personal, yes, but ... and the _but_ has the dignity of the sentence ... the personality is imaginary. It is a Character so far alive as to be able to conduct a magazine. It was a utilitarian conception. Steele was, or pretended to be, vastly annoyed when the authorship was found out and his own jolly person discovered under the sober clothes of Mr. Bickerstaff. 'The work,' he says, 'has indeed for some time been disagreeable to me, and the purpose of it wholly lost by my being so long understood as its author.... The general purpose of the whole has been to recommend truth, innocence, honour, and virtue as the chief ornaments of life; but I considered that severity of manners was absolutely necessary to him who would censure others, and for that reason, and that only, chose to talk in a mask. I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time must confess, my life is at best but pardonable. And, with no greater character than this, a man would make but an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit, that would have lost both its beauty and efficacy, had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele.' It is as if we were to hear Defoe apologising for dressing up as Robinson Crusoe, assuring us that his book is but an allegory, and telling us with due solemnity that he has lived with his wife these many years, and hardly above once set foot on shipboard, and then only between London Bridge and Greenwich. Steele was quite unaware that _The Tatler_ was an embryo novel. And yet, what is it, but an imaginary character, sometimes meeting other imaginary characters, and experiencing subjects instead of undergoing adventures?

[The Character and the short story.]

Mr. Bickerstaff was in himself a contribution to character-study in fiction; the daily talks that were put into his mouth by Steele and his friends, supplied others no less valuable. The Character, the neat driven team of short sentences, became in his hands something like a story. It became an anecdote with no other point than to bring alive the person described. And the portraits became less general. Types turned into individuals. Ned Softly, for example, is not called 'a very Poet,' and hit off with, 'He will ever into Company with a Copy of Verses in his Pocket; and these will be read to all that suffer him. Every Opinion he taketh for Praise, and Ridicule in his Ears soundeth like Flattery.' He is given the name by which he is known in private life. We see him walk into the room, hear his preliminaries, watch his battery unmasked as he opens his pocket, listen to his verses, hear them again, line by ridiculous line, observe him batten on the opinions he extracts, and see him hide his darlings at the approach of sterner-featured critics. The Character is become a little scene. The moth has no pin through his middle, but flaps his way where we may see him best. Here is the very art that Fanny Burney, that charming show-woman, was to use for the exhibition of Madame Duval; here the alchemy that was to turn puppets into people. It is the same that gave Pygmalion his mistress. The essayists owed much to their own hearts, or to the heart they set in 'our' Mr. Bickerstaff, for if you love a man as well as you laugh at him, it is great odds that he will come alive.

[Mr. Bickerstaff's letter-box.]

Steele probably got a few letters from unknown correspondents, dull and stupid as such things are. Perhaps in laughingly parodying them at the coffee-house tables he caught the idea of inventing better ones for Mr. Bickerstaff's assistance. Perhaps, when hard pressed for time, thrown to the last minute for his work by some merry expedition with the Kit Kats to talk and drink wine under the mulberry-tree on Hampstead Heath, he found he could get quicker into a subject through the letter of a servant girl than through Mr. Bickerstaff's first-personal lucubrations. However that may be, much of the best reading in both _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ is held in the letters supposed to be written to the man who was supposed to write the whole. These letters are not mere statements of fact, to serve instead of Latin quotations as texts for essays. They are imitations, 'liker than life itself,' of the letters of reality. Each one of them is written by some individual person whose impress on its writing is so clear that the letter makes a portrait of himself. Even the cock in Clare Market has a personality quite his own when he sends Mr. Bickerstaff a petition. And as for the Quaker; remember how he would have been described in the old manner, and read this:--

'TO THE MAN CALLED THE SPECTATOR

'FRIEND,--Forasmuch as at the Birth of thy Labour, thou didst promise upon thy Word, that letting alone the Vanities that do abound, thou wouldest only endeavour to strengthen the crooked Morals of this our _Babylon_, I gave Credit to thy fair Speeches, and admitted one of thy Papers every Day, save _Sunday_, into my House; for the Edification of my Daughter _Tabitha_, and to the End that _Susanna_, the Wife of my Bosom, might profit thereby. But alas! my Friend, I find that thou art a Liar, and that the Truth is not in thee; else why didst thou in a Paper which thou didst lately put forth, make Mention of those vain Coverings for the Heads of our Females, which thou lovest to liken unto Tulips, and which are lately sprung up among us? Nay, why didst thou make Mention of them in such a Seeming, as if thou didst approve the Invention, insomuch that my Daughter _Tabitha_ beginneth to wax wanton, and to lust after these foolish Vanities? Surely thou dost see with the Eyes of the Flesh. Verily, therefore, unless thou dost speedily amend and leave off following thine own Imagination, I will leave off thee.--_Thy Friend as hereafter thou dost demean Thyself_,

'HEZEKIAH BROADBRIM.'

Could anything of the kind be better? It needed only a series of such letters, consistent to a few characters, and dealing with a succession of events, to produce a 'Humphry Clinker.' The letters of Matthew Bramble and his sister, and Lyddy, 'who had a languishing eye and read romances,' are built no more cunningly than this of Hezekiah.

[Sir Roger de Coverley--a novel.]

If I were asked which was the first English novel of character-study, as I am asking myself now, I should reply, as I reply now, those essays in the _Spectator_ that are concerned with Sir Roger de Coverley. Set that little series of pictures in a book by themselves, as has been done with appropriate and delightful illustrations by Mr. Hugh Thomson, and in reading them you will find it hard to remember that you are not enjoying a more than usually leisurely kind of narrative. The knight is shown to us in different scenes; we watch him at the assizes, leaning over to the judge to congratulate him on the good weather his lordship enjoys; we see him smile in greeting of Will Wimble; we watch him fidget in his seat with impatience of the misdeeds of the villain in the play; we hear of his death with a tear in our eye that is a testimony to the completeness and humanity of the portraiture. If only his love-story were thinly spread throughout the book and not begun and ended in a chapter, _Sir Roger de Coverley_ would be a novel indeed. As it is, in that delicate picture of a country gentleman and country life--for Sir Roger does not stand against a black curtain for his portraiture, but before his tenants and his friends--we have the promise of _The Vicar of Wakefield_ and of _Cranford_, and of all that chaste and tender kind of story-telling that is almost peculiar to our literature.

[Johnson and Goldsmith.]

Johnson and Goldsmith followed the tradition. Even the ponderous Doctor could step lightly at times, and never so lightly as when he obeyed the instinct that turns discussion into fiction and essays into sketches. He too can write his letters, and that from Mrs. Deborah Ginger, the unfortunate wife of a city wit, is a story in itself. And as for Goldsmith, he can hardly hold his pen for half a paragraph before it breaks away from the hard road of ideas and goes merrily along the bridle-path of mere humanity. His letters from Lien Chi Altangi, that serious Chinese busied in exposing the follies of the Occident, turn continually to story-telling. A wise remark will usher in an Eastern tale, and, not even in the papers of Steele or Addison are the subjects of characters, like the little beau, who would have been a 'mere indigent gallant,' magicked so deliciously to life. Finally, he did with 'The Man in Black' what Addison and Steele could so well have done with Sir Roger. Fielding and Smollett had written before him, and he saw that he could follow their art without resigning any of the graces of the essayist.

[The later essayists.]

The eighteenth century saw the absorption of the periodical essayists into avowed story-telling. Miss Burney left them nothing to do but to write sketches for chapters that might have appeared in her books. The essayists who came later could only make beautiful examples of a form that was already a little old-fashioned, though, following other suggestions, they experimented in a new direction and found another art to teach to story-tellers. Leigh Hunt's pair of early nineteenth-century portraits, 'The Old Gentleman,' and 'The Old Lady,' betray the family likeness of the character as it was known to Overbury. Lamb's portrait of Mrs. Battle is nearer modern story-telling. He does not let us into more than one of Sarah Battle's secrets, but in telling us of her attitude towards the game of whist he shows us how she looked upon the game of life. We would know her if we met her, even if she were not seated at the card-table, the candles unsnuffed, the fire merry on the hearth, and in the faces of her and her partner and foes the frosty joy of 'the rigour of the game.' Hazlitt, though he stuck close to his Montaigne, and cared less to illustrate himself by other people than by his own opinions, gives us characters too--that noble one of his father!--and his account of Jack Cavanagh the fives player, and his description of his going down to see the fight, are splendid passages of biography and narrative. But the gift of the later essayists to story-telling was the new art of reverie, and of the description of an event so soaked in the describer's personality as to be at once an essay and a story. [The art of reverie.] Few forms are richer in opportunity either for essayist or story-teller, than that which made possible Lamb's 'Dream Children,' and in which the child De Quincey, who had been in Hell, could show us the calamity of three generations of beautiful children, and ask at last whether death or life were the more terrible, the more to be feared. It is sufficient to mention the names of Walter Pater and Mr. Cunninghame Graham to show that some of the finest work of modern times has been done in this kind of story-telling, and is being so done to-day. And this art, this most delicate art of suggested narrative, is it not also--to return, perhaps a little fancifully, to the tragic old knight's definition--is it not also 'a picture in various colours, all of them heightned by one shadowing'? Is it not also 'a quicke and soft touch of many strings, all shutting up in one musicall close'?

TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE

TRANSITION: BUNYAN AND DEFOE

[The old world of fairy tale.]

THE hundred years between the Elizabethan romancers and the English novelists was not a period of great story-telling like the fifty that were to follow it, or the first half of the nineteenth century. It is of interest here mainly because it witnessed a complete change of audience, the gradual transition of all the arts from a light-hearted and credulous old world to a careful and common-sense new one. The change is made very clear by a comparison of the stories popular before and after.

Robert Burton gives us a fairly accurate notion of the story-telling of the first quarter of the century, in a paragraph of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_. He is referring to spoken tales, but his description applies quite as well to tales in print. 'The ordinary recreations which we have in winter, and in the most solitarie times busie our minds with, are cards, tables and dice ... merry tales of errant knights, queens, lovers, lords, ladies, giants, dwarfs, theeves, cheaters, witches, fayries, goblins, friers, etc., such as the old woman told Psyche in Apuleius, Bocace novels, and the rest, _quarum auditione pueri delectantur, senes narratione_, which some delight to hear, some to tell, all are well pleased with.' In short, the material of Shakespeare's plays, of Spenser's _Faërie Queene_, of the early rogue books, and of the tales imitated from Italy and antiquity by Greene and Lodge and Pettie.

[A more sober spirit.]

By 1640 things had already changed a little. James Mabbe, the quaint flavour of whose Tudor style, endearing as the moss on an old house, reminds us that he published his translation of six of the _Exemplary Novels_ before Cervantes had been dead for a quarter of a century, felt that he had to apologise for them to the more sober spirit of the time. 'Your wisest and learnedst Men,' he writes, 'both in Church and Common-weale, will sometimes leave off their more serious discourses, and entertain themselves with matters of harmelesse Merriment and Disports. Such are these stories I present unto your view. I will not promise any great profit you shall reape by reading them, but I promise they will be pleasing and delightful, the Sceane is so often varied, the Passages are so pretty, the Accidents so strange, and in the end wrought to so happy a Conclusion.' That marks very neatly the mid-seventeenth-century attitude towards the art. It was not impossible that the simple unascetic humanity of Cervantes would be taken amiss by these people who were stirred by the forces that were producing a Cromwell and a Bunyan, a Commonwealth and a _Pilgrim's Progress_. Only, in contradiction to this, the translator could make a confident appeal to a Pepysian delight in pretty passages, strange accidents, and happy conclusions--a delight only different from that of the Elizabethans in its anxiety to be able to write 'harmelesse' when it had enjoyed them.

[Bunyan's world.]

Before the _Pilgrim's Progress_ was written there had come to be two parties in the audience: one with an epicurean delight in loose living, and one whose care was for a stern decency that postponed all flamboyance to a future life. The men of the first party flung their roses the more joyously for their antagonism to the sober black of the others, and were all the merrier for the thought that most of the community held them damned, although, when Bunyan wrote, theirs was the outward victory. Consciences were violently stirred, and so were either hardened absolutely, or else unmistakably alive. If you were good you were very very good, and if you were bad you were horrid, like the little girl in the rhyme. There had been revolutions and counter-revolutions; and likes and dislikes were pretty strongly marked, because men had had to fight for them.

Bunyan's business was the description of a pilgrim's progress through a world thus vividly good and bad. His choice of allegory as a method allowed him to illustrate at the same time the earnestness of his times and their extraordinary clarity of sensation. It was a form ready to his hand. The authorised version of the Bible, published in 1611, its English retaining the savour of a style then out of date, formed at once his writing and his method, as it constituted his education. 'My Bible and Concordance are my only library in my writings.' And, himself a minor prophet, he could quote from Hosea: 'I have used similitudes.'

[The justification of allegory.]

Bunyan's use of them was very different from Spenser's. Hazlitt said of _The Faërie Queene_ that, if you left the allegory alone, it would leave you; and his advice may be safely followed. It is not so with Bunyan, and his allegory must be defended in another manner. It needs defence, for although it is one of the oldest and pleasantest ways of producing wisdom-laden stories, it is so easy to use badly that people have become a little out of patience with it. We remember the far-fetched explanations tagged on to the _Gesta Romanorum_, and refuse any longer to be fobbed off with puzzles that are easy to make and hard to solve. We demand that a book shall have cost its author at least as much as it costs us. Allegory is like fantasy, either worthless, or not to be bought with rubies and precious stones; with anything, in fact, but blood. When Bunyan writes:

'It came from my own heart, so to my head, And thence into my fingers trickled; Then to my pen, from whence immediately On paper I did dribble it daintily,'

he sets up the one plea that is an absolute justification of his method; that it is 'dribbled daintily,' and came from the depths of him. The old monks wrote their stories, and searched their heads for a meaning. But Bunyan thought for himself, and could not think without seeing. His heart's talk was in passionate imagery.

[Bunyan and the early painters.]

He was the son of a tinker, and a tinker himself, and saw his visions as clearly as he saw his tin pans. His book is never opalescent with the shifting colours of a vague mysticism. It is painted in tints as sharp and bright and simple as Anglo-Saxon words. Bunyan had to throw himself into no trance in order to watch the pilgrim's arrival at the New Jerusalem. The Celestial City was as real to him as London, and there seemed to him no need to describe it in a whisper. His eyes were as childlike as those of the early painters, who clothed the builders of the Tower of Babel in fifteenth-century Italian costume, put a little bonnet on the head and a flying cloak about the shoulders of Tobias, and set soft leather boots on the feet of the angel. The whole of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is contemporary with Mr. Pepys. 'Now Christiana, if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the lute; so, since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson, and Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's daughter, named Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went in the road. True, he could not dance without one crutch in his hand; but, I promise you, he footed it well. Also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the music handsomely.' It might be Mr. Pepys himself describing the frolic of some friends. And yet it was the most natural, righteous thing in the world, since Great Heart had killed Giant Despair, and Despondency and Much-afraid had just been freed from the dungeons of Doubting Castle.

[The Fear of Life.]

It is characteristic of the English spirit that the greatest national classic of piety should be written by a man whose relish for life was in no way blunted by his thoughts of immortality. Bunyan had a fear of life no less real than his fear of God, and loved both God and life the better for fearing them. Men set capital letters to the Fear of God, and there is a Fear of Life no less different from cowardice. Bunyan, a brave man, imprisoned again and again for his beliefs, and more than once in imminent danger of hanging, shows in a passage of his _Grace Abounding_ this Fear of Life in a very glare of light. Bunyan had loved bell-ringing, and, after he had come to consider it not the occupation of a man whose profession was so perilous and serious as a Christian's, he could not help going to the belfry to watch those whose scruples still allowed them his favourite pastime.

'But quickly after, I began to think, "How if one of the bells should fall?" Then I chose to stand under a main beam, that lay athwart the steeple from side to side, thinking here I might stand sure; but then I thought again, should the bell fall with a swing, it might first hit the wall, and then rebounding upon me, might kill me for all this beam. This made me stand in the steeple door; and now thought I, I am safe enough, for if a bell should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be preserved notwithstanding. So after this I would yet go to see them ring, but would not go any further than the steeple door; but then it came into my head, 'How if the steeple itself should fall?' And the thought (it may, for aught I know, when I stood and looked on) did continually so shake my mind, that I durst not stand at the steeple-door any longer, but was forced to flee, for fear the steeple should fall upon my head.'

A man who felt as vividly as that, and was as stout as Bunyan, taking existence as he would take a nettle, took it with a grip as firm as that of love, and loved and feared his life as he loved and feared his God. He knew that brightness and clarity of sensation desired by Stendhal when he wrote, 'The perfection of civilisation would be to combine all the delicate pleasures of the nineteenth century with the more frequent presence of danger.' Life was very actual to him, and so, in this account of a pious dream, we find the clearest prophecy of that sense for reality that distinguishes the novels of the eighteenth century. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ was the first great story of that series of books that was to paint the English character in the eyes of the world.

[Facts.]

A fact is something very like an Englishman. It is a thing complete in itself, and satisfactory on that account. There is no vanity about a fact, and, as a people, we hate showing off. I can think of no other nation as hungry for fact as ours, none with a book that corresponds to the _Newgate Calendar_ and has been so popular, none with a book of spiritual adventure so actual as the _Pilgrims Progress_, none with a book of bodily adventure comparable with _Robinson Crusoe_. Defoe and Bunyan stand for the plain facts of religion and existence, in both of which they found so English a delight.

[The instinct for verisimilitude.]

Bunyan's book is an account of a dream. It is not a frank fairy tale demanding a certain licence of nature to make possible its supernatural events. Like the _Romance of the Rose_, unlike the _Faërie Queene_, it takes its licence in its first sentence--'As I slept, I dreamed'--and is able thenceforth to be as miraculous as it pleases without much loss of credibility, since miracle, if not consistency and continuity, is of the very element of a dream. It was an instinct for reality that made Bunyan give his story such a setting. Giants and dwarfs could no longer be jostled with thieves and cheaters as when Burton wrote. And Defoe, writing another forty years later, shows this same instinct for reality very much more conscientiously developed.

With an imagination scarcely less opulent than Bunyan's, Defoe, if he had described a dream, would have managed somehow to make it as short-winded and inconsequent as a real one. He was in love with verisimilitude, and delighted in facts for their own sakes. 'To read Defoe,' wrote Charles Lamb, 'is like hearing evidence in a Court of Justice.' No compliment could have pleased him better.

[Lamb and Defoe.]

The letter in which Lamb paid it him was written at the East India House, immediately after the labour of entering the accounts of a tea sale. Careless as it is, it contains a criticism of Defoe's books that goes to the root of his method. Here is its kernel. 'The author,' writes Lamb, 'never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather, autobiographies), but the _narrator_ chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says.' (It is interesting to notice that Defoe, a very early realist, obeyed the spirit of Flaubert's maxim, that a writer should be everywhere invisible in his work, and that his books should, so to speak, tell themselves.) 'There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully impressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phases, till you cannot choose but believe them.' Then follows the sentence already quoted. Lamb goes on: 'So anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact or a motive in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is an imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something on their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers.'

[The new world of matter-of-fact.]

There is little to add to that, though Lamb 'had not looked into them latterly,' or he would have noticed in Defoe's books, with his quick eye for such things, Defoe's wary way with anything that seems to him at all incredible. In _The Journal of the Plague Year_, for example, none of the more dramatic anecdotes are vouched for by the writer. He heard them from some one else, did not see them with his own eyes, finds them hard to believe, and so rivets the belief of his readers. We shall observe in discussing Hawthorne the more advanced possibilities of this ingenious trick. The best books of Defoe's are rogue novels, and in none of them was he content with a merely literary reality. His heroes are as solid as ordinary men, or more so. The figure of Selkirk shrinks away like a faint shadow behind that of Crusoe, whose imaginary adventures his own had suggested, and there can be no doubt in anybody's mind as to which of the two is the more credible. And then there is that style of his, homelier even than Bunyan's, though less markedly so, since he is describing homelier things. There is no Euphuism here; Defoe was not the man to deal in gossamers. The essayist's delicacy of line had not yet been given to the story-tellers, and Defoe was not the man to deal with silver point. His style is as simple and effective as a bricklayer's hod. He carries facts in it, and builds with them alone. The resulting books are like solid Queen Anne houses. There is no affectation about them; they are not decorated with carving; but they are very good for 'matter-of-fact readers' to live in. Matter-of-fact readers made Defoe's audience, and the hundred years since Burton wrote had made a matter-of-fact English nation out of the credulous Elizabethans. The eighteenth century opens with this note. The tales the old woman told Psyche have been blown away like dead leaves into heaps for the children to play in, and grown-up people, serious now, have done with fairy tale and are ready for the English novel.

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL

[For women by women.]

EUPHUES had addressed a dedication to the 'Ladies and Gentlewomen of England,' and had said openly that he would rather lie shut in a tiring closet than open in a study; but, writing for women as he did, he never tried to write as if he were himself a woman. On the contrary, Lyly's attitude was that of the gallant. The Elizabethan romancers who followed him were read by women but content to be men. Mrs. Behn, whose 'weltering sewerage' we have not had space to discuss, wrote for women, but certainly not less coarsely than if she had been writing for her own heroes. It was not until the eighteenth century that there was fairly launched a new story-telling, characteristically English in origin, without the fine careless heroism and improbability of romance, that it held was 'calculated for amusement only,' and different also from the mischievous realism of the picaresque. These ships, with their gallant scarlet and gold pennons, and their merry skull and cross-bones, had been long afloat before there came to join them a white barge with a lily at the prow and on her decks girls in white dresses, with their heads close together telling stories to each other. The author of a tale had hitherto been either a man, a god, or a rascal; he had never been content to be a girl. And the first of the new craftswomen was a fat and solid little printer and alderman of the City of London, called Samuel Richardson.

[Samuel Richardson.]

Richardson was an author of a kind quite new to English letters--neither a great gentleman like Sidney, nor a roisterer like Greene, nor a fanatic preacher like Bunyan, nor a journalist like Defoe; just a quiet, conscientious, little business man, who, after a duteous apprenticeship, had married his master's daughter like a proper Whittington, and, when she died, had married again, with admirable judgment in each case. It is not every one who can marry two wives and be unhappy with neither. As a boy, he had written love-letters for young women who were shy of their abilities. Girlish in his youth, he had preferred the tea-table to the tavern. Surrounded by women in his manhood, he was a grotesque little figure of a man, as inquisitive as an old maid, as serious over detail as a village gossip; walking in the Park, and looking at the feet of the women he met, and, as they passed him, quickly scanning their faces, and saying to himself, 'that kind of person,' or 'this kind of person,' and then going on to observe and summarise the next. He was accustomed, like a Japanese draughtsman, or a woman in a theatre, to complete and instantaneous observation. His was just the mind to show women what they could do; and this, with their constant applause and help, he did.

He had a lifetime of feminine society behind him when he was asked to write a series of letters on 'the useful concerns in common life' for the guidance of servant-girls, and, setting himself to the task, produced _Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded_, and then, stepping on from his success, _Clarissa Harlowe_, and finally the monstrous _Grandison_. The books were written in a close atmosphere of femininity. 'My worthy-hearted wife and the young lady who is with us, when I had read them some part of the story, which I had begun without their knowing it, used to come into my little closet every night, with--"Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. R.? We are come to hear a little more of Pamela."' Every letter of Clarissa's was canvassed by the tea-parties that wept and trembled for her fate, and worshipped her proud little creator. And all his friends contributed their ideas of the perfect man to the making of Sir Charles Grandison. No author had ever written so before.

[The novel by post.]

I believe that the femininity of the resulting books was due to his choice of the epistolary method as well as to his own temperament, and his enviable opportunities of studying the character of the audience at which he aimed. If he had not happened upon it, if he had tried to tell his stories in the manner fashionable at the time, they would but have been exaggerations and amplifications of tales that Steele would have put most comfortably into a single number of _The Tatler_ or _Spectator_. If he had used the autobiographical form he would have been prohibited from much of his detail, and all the effect of lighting his subject from several points of view. But letters were so new in story-telling that they helped him to be new himself, just as a new and unusual fashion of coat helps a man to be militantly original, within as well as without. And then letters, always describing events that have scarcely happened, excuse the most unlimited detail, the most elaborately particularised gossip or confession. Letters were the perfect medium for the expression of the feminine mind.

I do not deny that there are disadvantages in the novel by post, that concerns many characters in elaborate play. Richardson has, for example, to keep his corresponding couples, naughty Lovelace and uneasy Belford, Clarissa and the giddy Miss Howe, dodging apart again and again for the purpose of exchanging letters. We are tortured by Pamela's efforts for the good of her story, her letters sandwiched between tiles and buried in earth, the incredible agility of her postman John, and the forethought and luck that enables her to provide herself with ink and paper in the most impossible circumstances. And when Mr. Belford writes of Clarissa, 'there never was a woman so young who wrote so much and with such celerity,' we look at the huge volumes and find it easy to believe him. When we hear that 'Her thoughts keeping pace with her pen she hardly ever stopped or hesitated, and very seldom blotted out or altered,' we reflect that she certainly had not the time. And when later we are told that 'Last night, for the first time since Monday last, she got to her pen and ink; but she pursues her writing with such eagerness and hurry as show her discomposure,' we cannot help smiling to think how very advantageous such discomposure must be to Mr. Richardson, who is to edit the correspondence. There is this difficulty of credibility, and also occasional even more obvious awkwardnesses, as when the characters, always very obliging to their creator, have to enclose copies of letters that would not otherwise have got into print.

[Richardson does not attempt illusion.]

On the other hand, we cannot count these as serious blemishes on a form of art so far removed from any attempt at illusion. There is in Richardson's novels no sort of visualised presentment of life. We see his principal characters through little panes of glass over their hearts, and in no other way. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Clarissa really looked like, but I know well enough what she thought. Spasmodic reminders of Pamela's abstract prettiness produce little but an impatient desire to see a portrait. I remember but one glimpse of her, and that is in the first volume, when she has dressed herself up in her new homespun clothes, dangles a straw hat by its two blue strings, and looks at herself in the looking-glass. There comes an expression a little later, 'a pretty neat damsel,' and again, 'a tight prim lass,' and I think that the ghost of a little girl shows in the looking-glass, but only for a moment, like the reflection of a bird flying over a pool of water. Richardson's characters are decreasingly real from their hearts outwards. They have no feet. But their hearts are so beautifully exhibited that we cannot ask for anything else. To quarrel over them with Richardson is like quarrelling with the delightful Euclid because no one has ever been able to draw a straight line that should really be length without breadth. Such a line does not exist outside his books, yet Euclid is all in the right when he talks of geometry. Pamela and Clarissa do not exist outside their propositions, yet Johnson, talking fairly honestly, was able to say that there was more knowledge of the human heart in a letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_.

[The passion for respectability.]

It is knowledge of the human heart from the girl's point of view--the unromantic girl, for Richardson could never bring himself to believe in great passions. He would never have used as the text of a novel that sentence from the New Testament that has inspired so many later story-tellers: 'Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much.' Richardson's only passion is one not usually so called, and that is a passion for respectability. The desire for respectability, for her children's sake if not for her own, is part of every woman's armour in the battle of this world. In Richardson's two best novels it is something far more than this, an obsession that love cannot conquer nor goodness override. In Clarissa it is so Quixotic, so forlorn a hope as to be noble; but Pamela's respectability is a little disgusting. What, after all, is Pamela's story but the tale of a servant-girl who declaims continually about her honesty, writes foolish verse about it, lets her head fall on her master's shoulder, and refuses to be his except as his wife? She is quite right, of course, and most estimable. But her affronted virtue does not seem much more than a practical commercial asset, when she successfully marries the man who by every means in his power has sought to destroy it. Clarissa, on the other hand, has nothing to gain, nothing even to retain, except her self-respect. The respect of Howes, Belfords, and Harlowes could weigh but little with a being lifted from ordinary Philistine life into a conflict as unworldly as hers. She has the ivory dignity of some flowers, and the curious power of the book that traces her misfortunes is due to the spectacle of so flowerlike and fragile a being engaged in a struggle so terribly unequal. The struggle itself could hardly have been imagined by a wholly masculine writer. It is a kind of elaborate proposition, not a picture of life. It is like a chess problem in which we know that white mates in two moves, and are interested only in seeing how he does it. In Richardson, as in Euclid, we know always what is coming. Our artistic pleasure is in the logic and sequence of the intervening steps. If you expect a theorem to turn into a problem or _vice versâ_, the inevitability of Richardson annoys you; but if you read him in the right spirit that quality is your chief delight.

It is interesting to notice that Richardson, inventing girls' theorems, is unable to draw a hero in whom a man can believe. Lovelace, for example, is touched in in a way that makes women fall in love with him, but men feel for cobwebs in the air. Pamela's master is frankly incredible. And it is no bad illustration of Richardson's femininity that Charles Grandison, planned as the perfect man, has been found unbearable in the smoking-room, insipid at the tea-table, and has probably had no conquests but a few Georgian ladies'-maids. But the women, abstractions, algebraical formulæ, as they are, let us into secrets of the machinery of a woman's mind that no earlier novelist had been able to examine.

[Richardson's influence.]

Richardson's precise, intimate, feminine knowledge of women and feminine method of writing had a wider influence than that we are tracing in this chapter. He showed story-tellers a new world to conquer and quite unexplored possibilities in the telling of a tale. It was for this that he was translated by the Abbé Prévost, the Jesuit, soldier, priest and novelist, who wrote in _Manon Lescaut_ of a passion greater and more self-sacrificing than any that had come in the way of the little printer of Salisbury Court. And when St. Preux and Julie exchange those letters that brought a new freedom of sentiment into literature, Rousseau, who taught them how to write, had himself been taught by Richardson.

[Fanny Burney.]

I do not intend any detailed portraiture of the later writers of the feminine novel, but only in a brief mention of two of them to suggest the course they took in the development of their art, until in the nineteenth century it combined with and became indistinguishable from the masculine novel that held it at first in a not lightly to be reconciled hostility. Let us look along the bookshelf for a volume called _Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World_. Thirty years had passed between the publication of _Clarissa_ and that of Fanny Burney's best book, and in those years Fielding and Smollett had written, and _Humphry Clinker_ had shown that it was possible to describe in letters other things than a series of attacks on the armour of respectability. Fanny Burney took more material with a lighter hand, stealing away the business of _The Tatler_, _The Spectator_, _The Citizen of the World_, and trying not only to 'draw characters from nature' but also to 'mark the manners of the time.' She had learnt from a diligent perusal of Richardson, avoided a too elaborate postal system, and made her butterfly task the easier by writing of herself, whereas he had to invent the Clarissas and Pamelas of his more bee-like labours.

[Young lady's 'manners.']

Fanny Burney was the daughter of a popular music-master, whose house was always full of all sorts of people, so that she had the best of opportunities for observing that surface of life which she was able so incomparably to reproduce. She was able to see manners in contrast. Now 'manners' described by a man in a coffee-house--by Steele, for example, or Goldsmith, mean the habits and foibles of contemporary society. 'Manners' 'marked' at a young lady's rosewood desk mean vulgarity and its opposite, and the various shades between the two. In the essayist's eyes, manners were simply manners, to be described each one for its own sake. The feminine novelist found manners either good or bad, and was concerned with the tracing of a gossamer thread of distinction. The story of Evelina is not so much that of her love-affair with Lord Orville, but of the suffering or satisfaction of a sensitive person exposed alternately to atmospheres of bad manners or good. Evelina threads her way shyly along the border-line, and illustrates both sides by their effects upon her happiness. We are sorrier for her when she hears Miss Branghton cry out joyfully, 'Miss is going to marry a Lord,' than when she is in more serious trouble over her acknowledgment by her father. All the minor characters for whom the story makes a frame are set there as types less of character than of behaviour. There is Mrs. Selwyn with her habit of 'setting down' young men, and her characteristic praise of Lord Orville, 'there must have been some mistake about the birth of that young man; he was, undoubtedly, designed for the last age; for he is really polite.' There is Captain Mirvan, representing good birth and brutality of manners; Madame Duval, low birth seeking to veil itself in lofty affectation; the Branghtons, frank vulgarity; Mr. Smith, the tinsel gentility of the Holborn beau. Each character is in the book in order to inflict its peculiar type of manners on the heroine, so that we may watch the result. Evelina herself, delicious as she is, is given to us as a touchstone between good breeding and vulgarity.

[Feminine standards of delicacy.]

Miss Burney marks very clearly the introduction of the feminine standards of delicacy that were to rule the English novel of the nineteenth century. Evelina's criticism of _Love for Love_, written less than a hundred years before she saw it, distinguishes honestly between her own point of view and that of the best of men. 'Though it (the play) was fraught with wit and entertainment, I hope I shall never see it represented again; for it is so extremely indelicate--to use the softest word I can--that Miss Mirvan and I were perpetually out of countenance, and could neither make any observations ourselves, nor venture to listen to those of others. This was the more provoking, as Lord Orville was in excellent spirits, and exceedingly entertaining.'

[Jane Austen.]

Twenty years after _Evelina_, the novel of femininity took a further step in technique and breadth of design. Miss Austen, who in the last decade of the eighteenth century was writing the novels that were not to be published till after the first decade of the nineteenth, learnt from both her precursors. She was a proper follower of Richardson, but dispensed altogether with the artifice of letters, although the whole of her work is so intimate and particular in expression that it would almost seem to be written in a letter to the reader.[7] Like Miss Burney she had read the masculine novels of an ordinary life, whose strings were not so finely stretched as those of life in the books of the sentimental little printer; she had read Fielding and Smollett and the Essayists, and Miss Burney herself, but she carried the satire she had learnt from them deeper than Miss Burney's criticism of well or ill-bred manners. She deals more directly with existence. Miss Burney with lovable skill made her puppets play her game. Miss Austen's puppets played a game of their own. She remarked before writing _Emma_, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,' exactly as if she were a little girl rather capriciously choosing a new plaything. But Emma, once chosen, illustrates no special theorem, and is compelled to tread no tight-rope over the abyss of vulgarity. Miss Austen's world has the vitality of independent life, and is yet close under observation, like society in a doll's house. Her people are alive and real, and yet so small that she found it easy to see round them and be amused. Indeed, she grew so accustomed to laughing at them that she came to include the reader in her play. I am not sure if it would not be wise for any one who found a page of hers a little dull or incomprehensible, to consider very carefully and seriously if she is not being mischievous enough and insolent enough to win her silvery laugh from his own self. To read her is like being in the room with an unscrupulously witty woman; it is delightful, but more than a trifle dangerous.

[The analysis of the heart.]

But Miss Austen's satire is not so important as the clear, keen sight that made it possible. The feminine novel finds its justification and characteristic in the quick light gossiping knowledge of Miss Burney, in Miss Austen's bric-à-brac of observation, in Richardson's topographical accuracy among the hidden alleys and byways of the heart. Its tenderness of detail is its most valuable contribution to story-telling, associated though it is with feminine standards of decency, and the sharp point of feminine raillery. The first of these concomitants is a gift of doubtful, and certainly not universal, virtue. The second is no more than a variation, a different-tinted, other-textured version of the satire of men. But the gift to which they were attached has made possible some of the finest work of later artists, in those stories whose absorbing interest is the unravelling of tangled skeins of intricate psychology. Theirs is a minuteness in the dissection of the heart quite different from, and indeed hostile to, the free-and-easy way of men like Fielding and Smollett, and wherever we meet with this fine and delicate surgery practice we can trace its ancestry with some assurance to the feminine novel of the eighteenth century.

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL

FIELDING, SMOLLETT, AND THE MASCULINE NOVEL

[The English Renaissance.]

I HAVE always felt that the English Renaissance was considerably later than that of France or Italy, and happened in the eighteenth century. When we speak of the Italian or the French Renaissance we mean the times in the histories of Italy or France when the peculiar genius of each of these countries showed the most energetic and satisfying efflorescence. In Italy and in France this time was that of the revival of classical learning, when Boccaccio lectured on Dante at Florence and Ronsard gardened and rhymed. In England, although from the time of Chaucer to the time of Shakespeare we were picking continental flowers, and flowering ourselves individually and gorgeously, yet we had no general efflorescence in our national right, no sudden and complete self-portraiture in several arts at once. And this in the eighteenth century was what we had. All our national characteristics were unashamedly on view. Our solidity, our care for matter of fact, our love of oversea adventure, were exhibited in Defoe. Our sturdy spirituality had only recently found expression in Bunyan. Richardson discovered the young person who, rustling her petticoats, sits with so demure an air of permanence on Victorian literature, and represents indeed so real a part of our national character that we shall never be able to forget her blushes altogether. Our serious turn for morality showed itself at once in the aims all our authors professed, and in the pictures of Hogarth who, with courage unknown elsewhere, dared to paint ugliness as ugly. This is the century that represents us in the eyes of the world. If we would think of the Italian spirit we remember the _Decameron_; if of the French, we remember Ronsard's 'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' or Marot's 'Mignonne, je vous donne le bon jour.' But if a Frenchman tries to describe an Englishman his model is not a Chaucer but a Jean Bull, and the only adequate portraits of Jean Bull are to be found in the novels of Fielding and Smollett.

[Two points of view.]

Out of this general efflorescence were to spring two branches of story-telling different and hostile from the start. The novel was given sex. Richardson had scarcely invented the feminine novel before Fielding and Smollett were at work producing books of a masculinity correspondingly pronounced. Fielding was the first to mark the difference, and Richardson to the end of his life hated him for writing _Joseph Andrews_. It often happens that one philosopher hates another whose system though less elaborate is obviously founded on a broader basis than his own. Fielding could afford to laugh at Richardson, but Richardson could never laugh at Fielding. He could only enjoy the lesser satisfaction of holding his rival accursed. Their upbringings had been as different as the resulting books. Eton, law studies at Leyden and the Middle Temple, were a different training for the art of story-telling than the Dick Whittington youth of the little business man. Richardson saw the game of life from the outside. Harry Fielding knew the rough and tumble. Richardson was all for virtue; so was Fielding, but, as he would have put it himself, for virtue that is virtue. Virtue at the expense of nature he could no more understand than Benvenuto Cellini, who, if the facts in the case of Pamela had been set before him, would have thought her a devilish artful young woman, and, if he had met her, congratulated her upon her capture. Fielding had a short, rough and ready creed, and that was that a good heart goes farther than a capful of piety towards keeping the world a habitable place.

[_Pamela_ and _Joseph Andrews_.]

_Pamela_ made him laugh. He wanted to make money by writing, so he sat down to put the laugh on paper, with the ultimate notion of filling his pocket by publishing a squib. He set out to parody Pamela in the person of her brother Mr. Joseph Andrews. He had not gone very far in the performance before Parson Adams came into the story, and became so prodigiously delightful that it occurred to Fielding that he had here as admirable a couple for adventure as Cervantes himself could have wished, with the result that Mr. Andrews' correspondence does not compare at all favourably with his sister's, while his biography is infinitely more entertaining. When the book was done, its creator printed on the title-page: 'Written in imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote,' made no very particular reference to his original purpose, and described his book as 'A Comic Epic in Prose.' The masculine novel was on its way. Like _Don Quixote_ or _Le Roman Comique_ it represented a smiling move towards reality, or the criticism of reality, in Fielding's hands through the high and difficult art of ridicule, in the hands of Smollett, whose first book was published six years later, through the easier art of caricature.

These two men between them made the masculine novel of the eighteenth century. Its scope and character are best mapped out by a study of their respective lives, which were sufficiently unlike to make their books almost as different from each other's as they were from Richardson's.

[Fielding and Smollett.]

They both looked on man as man, a simple creature seldom wholly bad. They were not the fellows to tolerate humbug about platonic love, or the soul, or religion. Religion meant the Established Church, and a parson was a man, good or bad, a representative of the State perhaps, but not a representative of God. Love was no opal passion between Endymion and the moon. It meant desire between man and woman, as tender as you liked, but still desire. It was as simple a thing as valour, which meant ability to use the fists and stand fire. Fielding and Smollett knew a fairly brutal world. But their positions in it had been different. Fielding had always had his head above water. He is continually thinking of fair play, and feels, as we do, a thrill at the heart when he sees Tom Jones and an innkeeper shake hands after bleeding each other's noses. Smollett had had a harder time. He had known what it was to be denied the privileges of a gentleman. He had been in a subordinate position in the navy when that was an organisation of licensed brutality. He was as accustomed to seeing men's bodies cross-questioned, as Fielding to reading law-cases and examining men's minds. He writes always on a more animal level than Fielding. After every fight he lines up his characters for medical treatment:--

'"'n' well," says he, "'n' how Are yer arms, 'n' legs, 'n' liver, 'n' lungs, 'n' bones a-feelin' now?"'

Fielding only inquires after their hearts. Put their portraits side by side, and the difference is clear. Fielding's is the face of the fortunate man who has had his bad times and come smiling through; Smollett's that of the man not bruised but permanently scarred by the experiences he has suffered. An old sailor once said to me that you can judge of the roughness of a man's employment by the coarseness of his language; those whose work is roughest, using the coarsest words. Fielding is seldom disgusting. His heroes are constantly putting their feet into it; but not into unnecessary filth. It is impossible to say the same of Smollett.

[Smollett and Le Sage.]

Their choice of models was characteristic; _Joseph Andrews_ being written in imitation of the gentle banter of Cervantes, while _Roderick Random_ copied the more acid satire of Le Sage. Indeed, Le Sage was not serious enough. 'The disgraces of Gil Blas,' says Smollett in his preface, 'are for the most part such as rather excite mirth than compassion; he himself laughs at them; and his transitions from distress to happiness, or at least ease, are so sudden, that neither the reader has time to pity him, nor himself to be acquainted with affliction. This conduct, in my opinion, not only deviates from probability, but prevents that generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.' That is a moving and very remarkable paragraph. Between those lines is the memory of more than enough 'acquaintance with affliction,' and there is something terrible in the assumption, made with such absolute conviction, that good luck 'deviates from probability.' Smollett had not known much happiness, and found so light-hearted an aim as Le Sage's impossible. His own was almost vengeful. 'I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from his own want of experience, as well as from the selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.' Roderick Random is a rogue and a skunk, but we cannot blame Tobias Smollett if he did not know it. Random's more objectionable qualities are those that pull him through his difficulties. A nicer man would have gone under. The difficulties are at fault for making not Random but Smollett what he was.

[The technique of the English novel.]

The technique of the English novel was more elaborate than that of its models. Just as _Joseph Andrews_ is more orderly than _Don Quixote_, so _Roderick Random_ is a step between the pure rogue novel, the string of adventures only connected by the person of the adventurer, and the modern novel of definite plot. _Don Quixote_ and _Gil Blas_ could be cut off anywhere. Their creators had only to kill them. But the curtain could not be rung down on the adventures of Random or Andrew before quite a number of different threads had been properly gathered and explained. There were a few pretty wild coincidences to be discovered. Rory, Joseph, and Fanny all find their true parents; perhaps but rough and ready means to give rotundity to a story, but still pleasant mysteries, to be kept like sweetmeats and dessert as lures for flagging appetites. The novel had assumed some of the elaborate interest of the _nouvelle_, as practised by Cervantes and the Elizabethans, and the influence of the stage perhaps partly accounts for the construction of the English imitations, more consistent than that of their Spanish and Franco-Spanish models. The art of play-writing had reached its period of most scrupulous technique so recently that these two men who had failed in the theatre were not likely to forget its methods when experimenting with the more plastic art of narrative.

[Fielding the better artist.]

Of the two, Fielding is always the better artist. He is more interested in his art, more single-minded. He never forgets his duties as a novelist, and continually turns to the reader, just as if he were a sculptor executing a difficult piece of work in the presence of an audience whose admiration he expects. He was ready to laugh at himself for it too: 'We assure the reader we would rather have suffered half mankind to be hanged than have saved one contrary to the strictest laws of unity and probability.' He did not always keep up this admirable conscientiousness; but he did so more consistently than Smollett.

The delicacy of their craftsmanship is best compared not in their greatest books but in those two novels in which they essayed the same task, the portraiture of a rogue, and a rogue not after the merry sympathetic fashion of Lazarillo, but one whom the authors themselves accounted a villain and expected their readers to detest.

[_Jonathan Wild._]

The ironic biographer of Jonathan Wild realised the difficulties of the undertaking. He saw that unless he adopted an attitude which would make it proper for him always to express approval of his hero, his readers would begin to cast this way and that, not knowing whether to sympathise or hate, as the genius of the author or the villainy of the hero were alternately prominent in their eyes. Accordingly, choosing the name of a real and famous gallows-bird who had been hung some twenty years before, Fielding took his tone from those little penny biographies that used to be hawked among the crowd who waited at Tyburn to see their hero swing. He ironically takes this tone; and sustains it without a false note for a couple of hundred pages. How admirably he uses it:--

'The hero, though he loved the chaste Laetitia with excessive tenderness, was not of that low snivelling breed of mortals who, as is generally expressed, _tie themselves to a woman's apron-strings_; in a word, who are afflicted with that mean, base, low vice or virtue, as it is called, of constancy.'

And again in the passage that sums up the book:--

'He laid down several maxims, as the certain means of attaining greatness, to which, in his own pursuit of it, he constantly adhered.

As--

1. Never to do more mischief than was necessary to the effecting of his purpose; for that mischief was too precious a thing to be thrown away.

2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest.

3. Never to communicate more of an affair than was necessary to the person who was to execute it.

4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he has been deceived by you.

5. To forgive no enemy; but to be cautious and often dilatory in revenge.

6. To shun poverty and distress, and to ally himself as close as possible to power and riches.

7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behaviour, and to affect wisdom on all occasions.

8. To foment eternal jealousies in his gang, one of another.

9. Never to reward any one equal to his merit; but always to insinuate that the reward was above it.

10. That all men were knaves or fools, and much the greater number a composition of both.

11. That a good name, like money, must be parted with or at least greatly risked, in order to bring the owner any advantage.

12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily counterfeited; that the counterfeits in both cases adorned the wearer equally; and that very few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counterfeit jewels from the real.

13. That many men were undone by not going deep enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the whole game.

14. That men proclaim their own virtues, as shopkeepers expose their goods, in order to profit by them.

15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the countenance of affection and friendship.'

The whole scheme is worked out with a scrupulous attention to the main idea, and a consistency of mood that would not have been unworthy one of the self-conscious artists of a hundred years later. Poe himself could have built no more skilfully, and, lacking Fielding's knowledge of rascaldom, the straw for his bricks would not have been so good.

[_Ferdinand, Count Fathom._]

Smollett had the knowledge; but, a less perspicuous artist, did not realise the difficulties of using it. His villain is never frank in his villainy. Smollett intended from the beginning to disobey Fielding's principle, meant to save his rogue from the gallows, meant to do it all along, and was consequently handicapped in making him respectably wicked. Ferdinand, Count Fathom, does damnable deeds, but his author's purpose is completely nullified by his promise of eventual conversion. The book is not true to itself, but fails because Smollett was not sufficient of an artist to be able to send his hero to hell.

It is interesting to notice in one of the dullest scenes of this unsatisfactory book, that Smollett touched for the first time, in a fumbling, hesitant manner, the note of quasi-supernatural horror that was soon to be sounded with clarity and almost too facile skill. In the hero's device for the undoing of Celinda there is the first warning of the Radcliffes and Lewises and their kind, with their groans upon the battlements, their figures in white, and their unearthly music in the wind. Smollett did not wait long enough to find out what could be done with this new sensation. He jangled the note, and, in his inartistic way, passed on to paint and to reform the wickedness of the Count.

[Smollett the more versatile.]

I am a little ungracious to Smollett in saying so loud that he was an artist inferior to Fielding. Inferior he was, but when I set their best books side by side, I remember that there is little to choose between the pleasures they have given me, and am compelled to admit that the less scrupulous Smollett had the wider range. I read _Tom Jones_ in one sitting of twenty-four hours, and should like to write an essay on it, but can find no excuse for discussing here that epic of good-heartedness, since its characteristics are not different from those already noticed in _Joseph Andrews_. But _Humphry Clinker_ would have held me for as long if it had had as many pages, and in the history of the art, has, as an example of the novel in letters, an interest wholly separate from that of _Roderick Random_, which is a specimen of the picaresque. When Smollett came to write that book he was fifty years old and just about to die. He seems to have forgotten his old feud with life, and to look at things with a kindlier eye as one just ready to depart. His late-won detachment helped him to a scheme as clear as one of Fielding's, although even in this he is sometimes submerged in human nature. His notion was to describe the same scenes and events simultaneously from several points of view, in letters from different persons, so as to keep a story moving gently forward, with half a dozen personalities revolving round it, able to realise themselves or be realised in their own letters or those of their friends. In none of his other books are the characters so rounded and complete. There is Matthew Bramble, the old knight, outwardly morose and secretly generous; his sister, an old maid determined not to remain one, for ever grumbling at her brother's generosities; Lyddy, their romantic niece, and Jerry, their young blood of a nephew; and, as persons of the counterplot, Mistress Winifred Jenkins and Mary Jones; not to speak of the ubiquitous Clinker. The letters tell the whole story, and yet, written long after Richardson's, they have an older manner. Richardson's letters, with all their passionate reiteration of detail, do not concern themselves with foibles. They do not make you smile at their writers, and if you had laughed, as Fielding did, he would have been prodigiously annoyed. Smollett's letters have the same aim as the letters of the _Spectator_ or the _Tatler_. They are different only in less brilliant polish, and in their grouping round a story. The Humphry Clinker correspondence is as important as the letters of Clarissa in forming the most delicate and humorous epistolary style employed by Miss Evelina Anville.

[The motives of the masculine novel.]

The extreme difficulty I have experienced throughout this chapter in thinking of the technique of these novelists, instead of their material, is a tribute to their power. It is the same with Hogarth. It is impossible to get at the artist for thinking of the life upon his canvases. It is almost impossible to consider Fielding or Smollett as technicians (I have had to do it in their least human books), for thinking of the England that they represented. And now that I am looking about for a concluding paragraph on the work of these two men, when I should be summing up the general characteristics of their craftsmanship, I look at the pile of their books on the table before me, and feel a full and comfortable stomach, and cannot get out of my nose the smell of beer and beef and cheese associated as closely with their pages as lavender with the pages of _Cranford_. What an England it was in their day. Mr. Staytape carried Rory 'into an alehouse, where he called for some beer and bread and cheese, on which we _breakfasted_.' 'Our landlord and we sat down at a board, and dined upon a shin of beef most deliciously; our reckoning amounting to twopence halfpenny each, bread and small beer included.' The bright glances of Mistress Waters 'hit only a vast piece of beef which he was carrying into his plate, and harmless spent their force.' Her sighs were drowned 'by the coarse bubbling of some bottled ale.' Square meals are the best antidotes for sentiment, and in every scene of these novelists there is always some one who has fed too recently to allow any hairsplitting delicacy in the room with him. No confessional disentangling of emotions, but beer, beef, cheese, a good heart, a sound skin, and the lack of these things, are the motives of the masculine novel.

A NOTE ON STERNE

STERNE hardly comes within the scope of this book, since his was the art, not of telling stories, but of withholding them, not of keeping things on the move, but of keeping them on the point of moving. It is not without much difficulty and two or three chapters that a character of Sterne's crosses the room. The nine books of _Tristram Shandy_ bring him through the midwife's hands, and a little further. I believe we hear breeches talked of for him. Another nine books would perhaps let him put one leg into them. _Tristram Shandy_ is a continuous denial of the forms that Fielding and Smollett were doing their best to fix. But it is read by many who find them superficial, because Sterne writes of universal, whereas they write of a limited and particular humanity. They write of a Mr. Jones or a Mr. Random, while the hero of Sterne's book is man. He begins, as he puts it himself, _ab ovo_. He saw that the whole of humanity is a constellation revolving round the birth of a child, and contrived to introduce into his book every imaginable incident connected with that event. If Tristram Shandy does not grow up quick enough to take to himself a wife, My Uncle Toby is taken as a husband by the Widow Wadman. If he does not die, Yorick does. If My Uncle Toby's affairs do not go far enough to produce a baby, Tristram is born. In this book, where nothing seems to happen, everything does. It is the Life and Opinions, not of Tristram Shandy, but of Humanity, illustrated, not in a single character over a long period, but in half a dozen over a short one. For the story of the three generations of the giants, Rabelais needed land and sea, Paris and Touraine. For the adventures of his strolling players, Scarron needed a dozen little towns along the Loire, with inns and châteaux and what not. But for the adventures of Humanity, Sterne, who learnt from both of them, needed only a bowling-green, a study, a bedroom, and a parlour. There is really little else of background to the story. And it is all there; birth, love, death, and all the sad comedy of man misunderstood, and fortunate when, like Uncle Toby, he does not try to understand, the beginning in triviality, and the end in 'Alas, poor Yorick!'